Global Fascisms

Eine deutsche Übersetzung dieses Essays wird in Kürze veröffentlicht.

 

By Any Other Name

Around the world, there is a glaring turn towards a dark form of politics. One is reluctant to name it for what all its recognizable signs point to, for fear of accepting the reality that fascism is here and it is everywhere. But delaying this admission does not arrest this growing hydra, it only postpones strategic thinking about how to counter it. The essential processes of recognizing the demonic character of fascism in history have sometimes made it difficult to recognize the demons in the now and the everyday. They take many forms.

One can speak of ‘fascisms’ plural as the historical iteration manifested in many, sometimes competing narratives, born out of local obsessions, fabrications, and resentments. Each of them is rooted in nationalism, even if perverted and hypertrophied. Nationalism itself is arguably the most successful political idea of the last centuries, adopted in one form or another in every country, in empires and liberated lands, as well as by many communities aspiring to self-determination. But fascism is a distinct ideological formation from nationalism, as the debates of the last century have shown. Its lack of a coherent ideological proposition has also been discussed, as well as its unexceptional character.[1] Rather than an aberration, rare and thus easy to contain in a particular historical era, fascism is a set of symptoms, diverse but common, grown on the body of liberalism, pointing to distinct crises at different moments within its history. It has also been pointed out that more than repression, disdain for democracy, or violence, distinct characteristics of fascism pertain to its methods and ethos.[2] Arguably classical fascism, with all its original systemic violence, was well established before it unleashed its extermination plans, which was not necessarily obvious and unavoidable in the early years of its first Italian iteration. And while the scale of repression, destruction of democracy, and genocidal violence during classical fascism might give one pause before drawing analogies to our current moment, it is at least easier to see that fascism’s methods and ethos can be increasingly found in our world. Tragically, the arguments that genocidal violence is fundamentally incompatible with current regimes are also crumbling before our eyes.

Any comparative exercise between that era and our current moment is also haunted by the justified assurance that expired products of historical eras don’t return as anything close enough to the original. Fundamental changes in modes of production between early in the last century and now and the way they have transformed almost every aspect of society make these two eras vastly distinct, so much so that it would be difficult to imagine that they would generate the same ideological response. What could possibly connect an era of yearning for personal identity to dissolve in a national body that was to be venerated and aestheticized, perfect and pure, with our times of obsessive individuality? How can this past decade, in which inventions that have transformed eminently social activities into solitary pursuits, like the karaoke-booth-for-one, be the time when fascist modes seem to return and take hold on every continent? Furthermore, is it really helpful to connect a movement that exalted war, valued it as a virtue, and celebrated death with current politicians—from the US to Central and Eastern Europe—who use peace as a main slogan and the virtue of making deals over conflict? Notwithstanding that peace for the former involves bombing Iran and for the latter the acceptance of Russian aggression. And yet, when looking at the entire century and seeing fascism more as a set of symptoms mirroring different crises, these appear less as paradoxes and we can better understand what is affecting us.

The Global Fascisms project and exhibition thus attempts to trace different lines of continuity as well as of change. It follows a history in which exploitative elites have mastered and manipulated losses and resentments through the dark arts of deception. It looks at the way in which fascism has been made attractive, a seductive proposition that cannot be refused, uncomplicated and ruinous, a ‘final simplification of ruins’ (Clarice Lispector). From the desire towards its sleek early architectural forms to the insidious ways in which it has always manipulated aesthetics. From unimaginable stupidity to vile ignorance. From one body culture and cult of masculinity to another.

Then, like now, the future was confiscated from the hands of communal imagination by a perverse promise of technology. The speed of futurists more than 100 years ago has rushed towards the destruction of the accelerationists, into a future that is harder to imagine through democratic politics, while being captured as a frightening fever dream in the imagination of the tech bros. The technological saviour of the day, AI, is indeed terrifying, at least as an ideological proposition. Not because it presages a future, scary or otherwise, but precisely because it cannot imagine a future. AI is entirely drawing on the past, on everything that was created so far. Its threat is to multiply that set of knowns in an endless loop of reorganizing a past that drowns the possibility of human intelligence to invent a future that might make sense. It is the ultimate tool of nostalgia.

And above all, then, like now, targeted fear and hate have been unleashed, from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. Multiple other subjects become the focus of constantly fabricated fascist rhetoric, whether directed towards LGBTQI+ or BIPOC individuals or more generalized labels of ‘women’ or ‘foreigners’, depending on local specificities, often blended in a disdain towards ‘woke-ism’ in general.

‘Fascist’ has become, rightfully so, also an insult, even if one that more often than not stops any polite conversation rather than helps to clarify things. Fascism indeed did not stop with the victory in World War Two over several fascist regimes, and fascism has not otherwise been removed from polite political conversations in the western world, neither then nor now, even if it wasn’t always addressed as such. Even in the countries where fascist regimes were defeated in 1945, fascism survived in other forms. In Europe, the regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain (1936–75) and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal (1932–74) had deep ideological connections to Italian fascism (where the term, of course, originated). Franco’s legacy of violence perpetrated against its people is comparable to that of Benito Mussolini.[3] The regimes of Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar had many aspects in common. Spanish soldiers also fought on the Eastern front alongside Italian and other soldiers of the Axis powers, but officially as ‘volunteers’, without Spain formally entering the war.[4] At the end of World War Two, Spain became a military ally of the US and Portugal a founding member of NATO in 1949 (where the ideologically similar Regime of the Colonels in Greece (1967–74) could be found later on). Every single Spanish prime minister to this day belonging to the Partido Popular (PP) has opposed the removal of Franco’s statues, name, and cult from the country’s public space.[5] PP is a mainstream ‘centre right’ party, belonging to the same European People’s Party as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) or Poland’s Civic Platform—whose recent win in the country’s parliamentary elections was hailed as a victory against the previous Polish extreme right regime. Outside of Europe, it would not be too controversial to place regimes such as Augusto Pinochet’s Chile (1973–90) in the same close political family (while his regime’s brutality in fact much surpassed that of post-war Spain). And in India, the connections with and emulation of European early fascism in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the currently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party are widely known.[6] The shocking calls for mass killings and policies of annihilation of Muslims arising with increasing and worrying regularity from the lower ranks of these organizations are indeed reminiscent of the genocidal history of early fascism.[7] It is thus important to acknowledge that a political continuity has existed throughout the past century and that regimes and parties of the same persuasion have been around and formed part and parcel of political life in the world with very few Brandmauern (firewalls). 

Nevertheless, the proposition by this project of the term ‘fascisms’ is indeed slightly provocative. And as an aside and admission, provocation as a mode, after an illustrious history mostly as an instrument against establishments, operated from different corners of the left; it has been treated with suspicion by the left and then eagerly appropriated by the new right. So much so, that what can be seen as tactics of propaganda of new fascisms have largely been built around provocation. But our usage of the term is meant first and foremost to underline the continuities, mirrorings, and similarities of this amoeba, which has proposed different things at different times, even more so than other ideological formations that have survived long periods and broad geographies.

To this last point and stepping again into the narrow field of politics, Giorgia Meloni and her party Brothers of Italy offer perhaps illuminating examples. Italy has been of course a bellwether at various stages of the history we are interested in here, with Mussolini’s regime as a pioneer in Europe in the age of classical fascism; Silvio Berlusconi as perhaps the first in a series of post-Cold War populists in the western world and as a forerunner of such television-politics hybrids that have also brought us Donald Trump; and now Meloni as a likely first leader of a possible new wave of similarly-minded parties coming at the helm of core EU powers (not to mention earlier episodes from the eastern region of the EU, which are still seen as marginal and less consequential in the European political landscape). While Meloni’s party has a long documented admiration of and shared goals with Mussolini, revealed by both public statements from earlier years and leaked contemporary statements,[8] the party’s measures taken so far place it closer to what has become mainstream European politics, for now.

Returning to the issue of naming these movements and people, ‘far-right’ and ‘extreme right’ seem too vague and particularly unhelpful in terms of understanding economic policies in the post-neoliberal era. Most of these movements (with some loud and purist libertarian exceptions) seem to mix deregulation with at least a discursive distance towards orthodox neoliberal economics and social policies and, as argued below, their widespread success is to a significant extent a reaction to the multiple crises brought about by neoliberalism itself. ‘Right-wing populism’ is a more useful term to describe how most of these regimes operate in relation to their respective body politic. Yet even this term doesn’t fully reveal the political processes operating in society at large that have allowed these populist movements to emerge. Crucially, it doesn’t go very far in explaining, beyond politics, the deeper social and cultural processes occurring, including phenomena related to technological changes as well as the shifting regimes of desire and the body that are visible in society and culture and are related to these political shifts. These broader aspects are what this exhibition is particularly interested in, given art’s unique ability to cut through and reflect different layers of life and culture. If fascism in its classical era was a complex response to huge upheavals in society, its seeds and tentacles that have remained ingrained around the world are providing fertile soil for the current wave in society, which we call global fascisms.

However, this project tries to go beyond an enumeration of very bad men (and some women), who have come to power in diverse places such as the US, Russia, Israel, Philippines, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, or India, of which many have already been charged with the highest crimes against humanity in international courts or of various other crimes in national courts.[9] More than pointing to this collection of scoundrels and reprobates, this is an attempt to escape the logic of listing all the bad omens for the world. There is a psychologically comforting reflex, otherwise perfectly understandable, that relies on a mantra-esque repetitive enumeration of all the other places facing the same problem as one does, reaffirming that the issue is thus shared and one is not alone in the dark. But this method has its obvious limits.

This text as well as the exhibition include a mapping of different regimes, countries, and contexts. They differ significantly in terms of conversations, issues, and ultimately in terms of the extent to which fascist ideas have penetrated society, the field of politics, and the leadership of those countries. In most of those places, fascism is a lurking danger that has not yet taken the reins; others however offer a stark warning of what could lie ahead.

The exhibition takes place in Germany, whose leading murderous role in the history of fascism remains the fundament of these conversations. It is also a country where current opinion polls are topped by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right organization which the German domestic intelligence services (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) have officially labelled as extremist.[10] Yet in terms of its policies in regards to migration, censorship, or repression of pro-Palestine activism, the gap between AfD and the officially centrist parties in Germany is difficult to notice.


Rivers of Blood and Seas of Despair

Offering an éclaircissement for the underlying causes behind the development of fascism might be comparable with the daunting task of navigating between the piles of casualties proposed for the fall of the Roman Empire. Let us nevertheless try. Firstly, how did the new wave of fascism start? While, as argued above, one can draw multiple continuous threads between the current moment and the fascism of the early twentieth century (as well as the romantic inventions of nationalism in the nineteenth century), it is hard to deny that we are going through a new wave that has swollen and amplified those discreet streams of fascist thinking that have never really left the public sphere. So new catalysts must have contributed to this recent process.

Fascism has at its core a sense of loss, either entirely imagined or very real. Early twentieth-century fascism exploded with the widespread economic impacts of the Great Depression, having grown out of the losses of the First World War. These included the immense loss of life, which normalized the violent death of Europeans on European soil at levels not seen since the Napoleonic era and in some regions since the religious wars of the seventeenth century;[11] the loss of imperial hopes and the defeat in the war for Germany, Austria, Hungary, or Bulgaria, which provided most of the arguments for fascist political discourses in these places (a line of argument, which in the case of Hungary and its trauma of loss through the Trianon Treaty,[12] remain at the core of its political discourse today); and the loss of confidence in the myth of European civilization and economic integration that would inevitability lead to peace and stability[13] (which came after almost half a century of peace between major European powers and economic integration not achieved afterwards until the last years of the twentieth century).

But crucial in the ignition of fascism in the first place were the immense social changes in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, with the unprecedented wave of industrialization and urbanization in this period, which tore asunder the old world and changed beyond recognition the landscape, lifestyles, and beliefs of large parts of the continent. While these shifts brought many gains, in income, quality of life, public health, etc., they also led to the loss of traditional support networks, long-held world views, social forms of organization, and religious stability. It is no coincidence that the parts of Europe that went through the industrial revolution later (including Germany, Austria, Italy,[14] Spain, Hungary, or Romania) were mostly the places where fascism was able to take firm hold and usurp power, only a few generations after those radical transformations in society. Equally decisive for the initial birth of fascism were the tremendous intellectual changes at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the blink of merely two decades, the entire universe and the basic laws of physics were imagined differently with the theory of relativity; the human psyche became a field to be studied, healed, or altered with the advent of psychoanalysis; people could fly; art lost its basic definition unchanged for centuries in Europe and a new formidable and seductive art form, cinema, appeared seemingly out of nowhere, leading to new possibilities of representation and persuasion. These novelties and gains inevitably led to a sense of loss of old systems of knowledge, dogmas, institutions, and entire intellectual circles and frameworks.[15]  It is also no coincidence that some of the most consequential ideas for European fascism appeared simultaneously and in close proximity to the most revolutionary ideas in science and arts, in Vienna and Paris.

And yet, it would be deceiving to search for the genesis of fascism elsewhere than amongst the elites themselves. Economic and political elites seeking to preserve their power when faced with the prospect of social change or the rise of a competitive new elite have often instrumentalized fascist ideas and movements. So, often, fascist projects have been responses to (or preventions of) revolutionary movements from the left. The current wave can also be seen in reaction to many social movements around the world, even if they are more diffuse and ideologically mixed. Indeed, the last decade and a half has seen an unprecedented series of protest movements in the post-Cold War era. These include, to mention a few, the Arab Spring (2010–12), with later protests in Algeria (2019–21), Sudan (2019–22), and Lebanon (2019); multiple waves of protest in Iran (2008–9, 2017–18, 2021–22), South Africa (2017), Nigeria (2020), Senegal (2024), or Kenya (2024); the Milk Tea Alliance protest waves in Hong Kong (2012, 2014, 2019), Taiwan (2014), Myanmar (2021–ongoing), and Thailand (2020–21); the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine (2013–14); the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (2013); electoral protests in Russia (2011–13); and the Occupy protests around the world (2011), amongst many others. Most of them have been unsuccessful in many of their goals, with a growing impression that street movements have a decreasing power to affect revolutionary change.

The second foot on which the conceivability of fascism rests, historically as well as now, is the colonial project, on its rivers of blood and seas of despair. Centuries prior to nineteenth-century nationalism, scientific racism, and the formal domination of most of the world, Europe invented discourses of dehumanizing others and perfected tools to administer exploitation. The sugar plantations of the early Atlantic era, factories of death and extraction that have benefited most parts of Europe (even the less visible ones in the early colonial enterprise, including the German lands), were foundational moments in the history of the concept of camps.[16] Settler colonialism, with its annihilationist logic, became another fundamental intellectual premise for European fascism. Its legacy continues well into the post-war era in settler colonies that were among the victors in the war, in policies such the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families (in Canada, Australia, or Greenland, for example) who were enrolled in educational institutions or even forced into adoption; compulsory sterilizations and other eugenic policies; as well as cultural and economic destruction.[17] And it continues to the current day, when annihilationist replacement accompanies ongoing settler colonial projects with their land grabs, mass expulsions, and murder.


 Loss and Resentment, Losers and Winners

There are a few things worth mentioning before attempting to trace the losses that have led to the new wave of global fascisms. There are specific material conditions for losses to be perceived as such, as more than the impermanence of everything human and the wearing and tearing of humanly things, of ideas, fashions, objects, or buildings, with every generation that passes. There are certainly times when the promise of history towards progress makes losses irrelevant. And there are even more moments when history doesn’t seem to move, nothing changes, nothing is gained, and nothing is lost. So an acute perception of loss is in fact exceptional when it occurs. Losses are also relative. When looking at groups who perceive their social or economic losses as the greatest, and who tend to be the most vocal supporters of resentment-based fascist movements, they are hardly the most marginalized groups in society. They are often the ones who have benefitted from a system that has nevertheless benefitted others more. Lastly, the feelings of loss, as well as nostalgia, are not limited of course to fascist yearning, particularly in our moment. In much of the western world, centrist politics have also been formulated in the vein of yearning towards ‘nicer’ times.

So, to start our conversation about losses in the western world, where fascism was born, and in the field of economics, the last decades have seen widespread stagnation of living standards in this region, on the background of an unprecedented wave of wealth creation at the top through globalized capitalism. The early neoliberal moment of the 1980s created wealth for some while at the same time manufacturing a certain level of optimism about these economic gains being available to the many (Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle down economics’ is just one example). This continued in the 1990s, with renewed sources of optimism drawn from the end of the Cold War. The 2008 crisis would bring all this to a halt. This crash created a fertile ground for resentment towards the global economic elite and towards the values of globalization which they espoused, with all the implications for international relations that derive from there. The arrogance of the winners, of the ones who weathered this cycle, has also contributed to this reaction. Through social media, which started to become dominant around the time of the financial crisis, most people with internet access globally were now able to see parts of society up close, not filtered through legacy media. Many realized that the privileged can be indeed insufferable, and that their wealth, which was growing in this period in spite of the turbulence felt by many, was obscene. While traditional media outlets were previously able to package the wealth of the elite as a world that was distant and aspirational, social media made it close and palpable, yet an un-crossable ocean apart and awfully obnoxious.

The 1989 loss of a communist horizon[18] and the profound effects it had on movements on the left made it unable to channel the struggles of globalization’s dispossessed, with no political programme or visions from the left emerging in Western Europe or the US in this period to address soaring inequalities. These decades nevertheless saw other movements—among them LGBTQI+ rights and feminism—obtain relative success culturally as well as in the realm of representational politics. At the same time, this visibility increased resentment from groups who saw their previously privileged place in society slipping away, left out of the sparkling global economy and of the success stories of progressive movements.

A familiar trope in the fascist equation is the pivoting towards a past golden era, real or imagined. In Western Europe, North America, or Australia, this projection went back before the neoliberal era to the 1950s and 60s, summoning the post-war years of rapid economic growth, robust social policies, high social mobility (as well as low or almost inexistent immigration and sodomy laws still on the books). This was an age of social stability, with hopes of economic betterment alive or at least plausible, as well as of  being surrounded by people who look like each other.

Central and Eastern Europe saw a more dramatic transformation over the last decades, with sometimes catastrophic losses of wealth in many of these countries, a generalized decimation of social safety nets, and the dissolution of many political and cultural certainties. All these shifts were accompanied by the loss of the powerful hope of the 1990s (naïve as it might have been) of becoming full and respected parts of the European continent and of sharing in its growing wealth.[19] Neither was the embrace full hearted, nor were the riches of the entire continent what they had been. At the same time, economic elites and minority groups in the region seemed to benefit from European integration, whilst many from the majority working classes experienced various degrees of dispossession in their countries, brought about by a radically changing economic system or by the humiliations of working as migrants in Western Europe in jobs below their training. So again, here too, a dream towards a golden era brought comfort. However the period of post-war growth that was the ideal in many Western European discourses allowed for only limited bouts of nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe given the dire political situation of those decades haunted by Stalinism and repression. Thus, yearning towards even earlier periods took hold. Amongst the many examples from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary that can be picked to illustrate aspects of the contemporary fascist turn, there is a minor yet illuminating one: a massively expensive government programme which, alongside the reconstruction of the Royal Palace in Budapest damaged in the Second World War (a story eerily similar to the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss in Berlin), entails the obsessive restoration of rooftop decorations to their exact belle époque details on buildings across the capital that have otherwise largely survived the twentieth century.[20] This yearning for an era of ancien régime prestige, when Budapest’s belonging to the European core was hardly questioned, finds resonance around the world. In the US, the same yearning for a diffuse golden era of greatness is driving Trump’s fantasies, which oscillate between the otherwise contradictory moments of classicism, seen in his attempt to mandate classicism as the official style of new federal buildings[21] and in the rococo flair he has splashed onto his interiors, from hotel lobbies to the Oval Office.

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was initially widely and foolishly seen in the rest of the Eastern bloc as the winner of a lucky draw, with its quick integration in the West as part of a unified Germany in the early nineties, the loss has arguably turned to be more dramatic: the loss of a country; distinct society; and sense of dignity through the widespread loss of control of positions of power in the region to citizens from the West.[22]

However, probably the strongest feelings of loss, whether in the GDR, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the West, came from an increased sense that elected leaders—and indeed, politics itself—was at the mercy of the neoliberal idea that free markets should be allowed to function unimpeded, with as little regulation and oversight as possible.

Tracing the perception of losses and socioeconomic dynamics elsewhere, in the Chinese context, several phenomena have been occurring simultaneously that could be found in other places at various moments that separate the beginning of classical fascism and today. The lingering resentment towards European, US, and Japanese colonial interventions from 1839 onwards is still being discussed in China as the ‘century of humiliation’—particularly the Japanese occupation and genocidal policies (not fully acknowledged to this day by the perpetrators).[23] These resentments find fertile ground in the profound social transformations of a recently urbanized society. But China is also experiencing, often in an accelerated and hypertrophied manner, contemporary phenomena seen in other contexts around the world. The last decade and a half of otherwise continuous economic growth and extraordinary wealth creation has also brought a dramatic decrease in social mobility, with classes becoming cemented, and a growing realization for hundreds of millions of people that the economic horizon is unlikely to bring them the endless wealth of possibilities which the previous decades promised. That there is not much more to this life than the current state can be experienced anywhere as a profound loss when coming right after one of the most dramatic periods of collective and individual improvement in social status. So while China’s timeframe of social immobility (the past decade) has been shorter relative to the western world, the resulting resentment is similar or even more acute. Such a loss of horizon has been a fertile ground for ideological manipulation towards nationalism.

While some aspects of growing Chinese nationalism may resonate with the history of early fascism through its direction via state propaganda, its mushrooming and speed is also largely due to the effects of social media (a field discussed below in more detail). While social media is highly controlled, pockets of anger are permitted, almost always around nationalist issues (because these episodes of apparently free-for-all manifestations of outrage make social media the only public space in China where some individual expression is allowed, it has an outsized influence in the country).[24] Outrage at an increasing number of incidents that ‘hurt the feelings of Chinese people’ regularly spark waves of anger involving millions. These include defining Taiwan as part of China or not; the control of the South China Sea; memory politics around the Japanese occupation during World War Two; or even the treatment of pandas[25]—seen as a national symbol—which have been lent by the Chinese government to zoos around the world.

It would be difficult however to move on from this topic without discussing the great sense of loss that the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution has left behind in the Chinese context. That period, engineered from the top yet offering a sense of personal empowerment, saw countless elements of Chinese culture, both material and immaterial, destroyed. Rather than an aberration born out of the particularities of communist rule, the Cultural Revolution could be seen as an amplification, an extreme form of a particular strain of a conversation that had been taking place for at least a hundred years prior. From the beginning of the debates about modernization during this ‘century of humiliation’, traditional culture—what to let go and what to preserve—was an important topic of debate. The generation of the Red Guards who spent their youth smashing temples and ancient ceramics (and publicly shaming millions of other people, with many not surviving this period)—the ‘creative disruptors’ in more recent yet connected parlance—who would later on become the perfect agents of neoliberal development[26] with its empowerment of individual will, have also developed a sense of melancholy and yearning for the ancient culture they tried to destroy. Indeed many of them who would end up amassing great fortunes after China’s economic opening have used their new wealth to recuperate objects destroyed in that period (several known collectors of Chinese antiquities have had documented pasts as Red Guards).[27] Museums that have opened with these collections are often less concerned about restoring Chinese culture—with its own aesthetic system and culture of appreciation—and more about building an arsenal of achievements, serving the narratives of a ‘superior’ culture. These museums, with their over-veneration of objects (often valued for the price they fetched at auctions), are haunted by a sense of guilt. They often seem like a trophy chest hiding a crime scene, not unlike a European museum of looted artefacts.

The particularities of China’s regime are still important to underline in a global context. The Communist Party of China (CPC)’s ideological connections to Marxism-Leninism remain strong and have been reinforced in the last decade. Even more so, the long-term planning nature and rationalist values espoused by the regime appear to function at frequencies that save it from the fears that fuel populism, with its methods of unpredictability and strategic irrationality. But the system itself, in the absence of electoral confirmation, derives its legitimacy from an always ill-defined ‘will of the people’, difficult to measure or verify and ultimately open to the interpretation of the leadership, which in the last years has been increasingly concentrated in a single person. And the mainstream discourse is increasingly developing a form of nationalism that could be viewed as supremacist and exclusionary, of both marginalized ethnic groups and ‘undesirable’ social classes, as seen in the mass evictions of (mostly Han Chinese) rural migrant workers from Beijing in 2017.[28] These put China dangerously at the risk of veering into a fascist view of society and development.

In this framework, Hong Kong occupies a unique position. The past decade saw ultimately unsuccessful mass protests demanding a furthering of the territory’s democratic structure, one that the British did not implement for most of its colonial rule, and which Beijing was even less willing to offer. Throughout this period of upheaval, fundamental processes have occurred that can be seen to have crafted a national idea for the people of Hong Kong, along the same lines that have invented hundreds of other nations over the past two centuries. Whether this idea can survive for what is likely the youngest nation invented in the world, in a much changed political landscape in Hong Kong is uncertain, but very few, if any, nations once invented and embraced by enough members were ever undone from the public consciousness. [29] The latest and largest of the movements in this period in Hong Kong, the anti-extradition protests of 2019, saw millions of people mobilizing across the political spectrum. However, a visible part of the movement was formed by right-wing groups, manifesting their support towards the British colonial past as well as towards US President Trump and his anti-China stance, causing further Chinese nationalist backlash.

An intellectual debate is ongoing about the nature of the North Korean regime, with several arguments having been put forward about the many fascist elements that characterize it.[30] These include the superhuman status of the rulers, their claimed connection to mythical kings and the holy mountain of the country, Paektu, and the way these are projected onto the people, thus framing the concept of the nation. So do the obvious connections to both Japanese and European fascism: an obsession with ethnic purity and the view of the nation as uniform and exceptionally unique in relation to foreigners (a position not absent in South Korea as well,[31] whose military regimes and their successors in the present day could otherwise neatly be inscribed in the far right histories narrated here); the elimination of references to Marxism-Leninism and communism in constitutional documents in favour of Juche and Songun and their all-encompassing ideological possibilities; the switch between the working class and the military in said documents (though formally reversed in 2021); and a sense of perpetual victimhood in relation to external forces.

These dynamics of loss and resentment and yearning for bygone golden eras can also be seen in countries like India and Turkey. For example, India’s Hindutva political ideology has been largely supported by social groups whose living standards have been on the rise following the liberal reforms of 1991 (and particularly in the last decade of sustained economic growth). And yet the ideological constructs embraced by these demographic groups, consisting primarily of recent urban dwellers, has relied on a sense of loss, connected to a fictional golden era of a pure Hindu subcontinent, prior to the much maligned Muslim Mughal ‘occupation’ and the (paradoxically less dreaded) subsequent western colonialism.[32] This plays out in a constantly amplifying wave of indiscriminate episodes of structural cultural revisionism, petty debates around localized obsessions, occasional shocking episodes of violence, clashes with the arch enemy Pakistan, and a sharpening of Islamophobic discourse with annihilationist undertones,[33] greatly encouraged by the destruction of Gaza, which has garnered widespread support amongst the right in India. In Turkey, the Justice and Development (AK) Party’s rule has also relied to a significant extent on social groups who had seen themselves marginalized in the secular Turkey that was seen to primarily benefit an elite of ‘White Turks’ who dominated a significant part of the economy, politics, and the official narratives of the country for the better part of the century since its establishment in 1923. For this part of society, a golden epoch to aspire to included an Ottoman fantasy rather than just the narrow Kemalist era that favoured another social order.[34]

Rallying against entrenched elites was also the engine behind Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power in the Philippines, following what was seen as the Aquino dynastic rule. But whereas in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shepherded over a process of elite replacement to a significant degree—towards ‘Grey Turks’—the Philippines saw no such process, but only an attempt of setting up a new dynasty at the very top. A few decades earlier, the Civil Wars in Liberia 1989–1997; 1999–2003 (as well as that in Sierra Leone (1991–2002)), were largely carried out on the ruins left by the overthrow of the entrenched Americo-Liberian minority elite that had ruled Liberia politically and controlled most of the economy for 133 years. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was largely fuelled by resentments towards a group, Tutsi, whose elite status (and even criteria of belonging to the group) were to a significant extent colonial racist fabrications, nevertheless still festering in the independent nation.

Turning to Russia, it would be hard to overstate the role that resentment plays in its contemporary politics and the paranoid Dugin-ist ideas that animate it. While the immediate arguments relate to resentments of having lost the Cold War (often described in the country in similar terms to the atmosphere in Germany after having lost the First World War), that history runs much deeper. In dominant parlance (in a context where historical trivia and trappings of European high culture circulate as significant social currency), Russia sees itself as the third Rome.[35] It is thus inheriting both a trauma of civilizational collapse (a double one to boot, from both Rome and Constantinople), and a self-identity as inheritors of the Roman Empire. At least since the Putin era, it also sees itself as the inheritor of the entirety of western civilization. In this logic, the first Rome fell to migrating barbarians, Constantinople to Muslim invaders, and of western civilization to both, in alliance with gender ideology. Discourses of fear and hate don’t stop here however. A recent, eccentric moral panic in Russia is kvadrobing, referring to children dressing up as animals and mimicking their movements. For the seeker of moral outrage, kvadrobing has everything: corrupted children; queerness—sort of, albeit with an interspecies twist; and purported western machinations behind it, with the aim to dehumanize Russians. Naturally, the phenomenon was swiftly condemned and proceedings to formally ban it have started. Fundamentally, Russia sees itself as a perpetual victim of Europe rather than a major European empire, one that has been most successful at maintaining its conquered colonial territories even after the break-up of the Soviet Union.[36] [37]

At the same time, in all these places and around the world, another loss has been felt, even if not mourned. A loss of confidence in western political discourses and economic models, the crisis of the two influencing each other. The latter has been severely affected by the economic crisis of 2008, by the continuous neo-colonial extractivist relationship between North Atlantic countries and the rest of the world, as well as by the more glaring economic success of new powers outside of that geography. In regards to political discourses, particularly the ideology of human rights of the last decades has been irreparably compromised by the double standards employed by western establishments towards the wars and atrocities of the last years, which have rejuvenated a sense of resentment towards former colonial powers and their allies. This justified outrage has certainly generated important conversations about furthering processes of self-reliance and the imagination of different forms of national and transnational politics in different parts of the world. But it cannot be denied that it has also been instrumentalized by positions on the fascist spectrum.

The lack of confidence in its own discourses and models is also felt acutely in the West itself, as its loss of pre-eminence in the world is becoming more and more apparent with every geopolitical news cycle and more so with every economic report. The loss of global market share for German and more generally for western car manufacturers over the past few years has been nothing short of catastrophic, for example. It would be a mistake thus to relegate the rise of fascism in the former colonial powers only to issues occurring within their own borders and neighbourhoods, as much as the political voices of the extreme right would focus on policing these. The tipping of broader geopolitical scales, the general European economic, political, and cultural malaise, as well as the extensive US-American discourse of imperial decline are rallying cries for the new fascists across the North Atlantic to not go gently into that good night.

This fin de siècle discourse in the US has in itself destructive effects, as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a vicious cycle. The apparent paradoxes of the US right, managing to simultaneously entertain contradictory thoughts (the greatest country that needs to be made great again, etc.), has been rather slyly explained by JD Vance through another reference to Roman history. Rather than drawing parallels to the end of the Roman Empire, he called the current moment in the US a ‘late republican era’, akin to the end of 500 years of the Roman Republic brought about by Caesar’s dictatorship, which was nevertheless the actual dawn of the Roman Empire, ushered in a few decades later by Caesar’s successor Octavianus, a role Vance would probably fancy for himself in the US story. The US does seem to be insecure about the political establishment it has built, at home and abroad. Many concepts in classical fascism drew inspiration from US-American history, including racial laws and the National Socialist (NS) concept of Lebensraum.[38] This legacy, as well as the entire Pax Americana, seem not to enough for the new American right, so figures such as Curtis Yarvin—who has surfaced from the dark corners of the internet with his talk about the need to cancel US democracy—is being held in great esteem by Vance and others.[39] The US is also looking for models elsewhere, something that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. This includes the admiration expressed by Trump for the Gulf countries, UAE, or Saudi Arabia—sleek, gilded, aseptic, and untroubled by democratic processes or the checks of a judiciary. Or for the Singapore model, which had been greatly admired for a while now in many places, from the rest of South East Asia to Central Asia and to some liberalizing voices in China, where it was meant to serve as a model for partial opening of the system rather than as a model of increased neoliberal control. And, while the election(s) of Trump have certainly been an impulse for the global fascist trend, it also largely follows earlier trends from elsewhere rather than being the original inspiration for this new age of authoritarianisms. All the while, the international system that the US created—with itself at the imperial top, and from which it has derived enormous benefits—is being dynamited from inside by many of the Trump administration’s actions. At the same time, Elon Musk’s DOGE experiment of dismantling core parts of the ideological establishment of US power in the world (including USAID and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)) and of placing in positions of high imperial responsibility figures such as the 19-year-old known as ‘big balls’ seems less radically libertarian and more millenarist and self-defeating. While continuing to be driven by the deep US-American colonial ambition of a manifest destiny of space conquest, the fear towards other imperial competitors seems to be leading more to self-sabotage than to a journey to Mars. The closest parallel one can think of is the work of Nongqawuse, a prophet who successfully advised Xhosa King Sarhili in 1856–1857 to perform a mass killing of all the kingdom’s cattle, as a millenarist response to increasing colonial pressure. Predictably, this act eventually made it easier to succumb to external forces.[40] 

It would only seem rational then that these reactionary forces to economic dynamics of power, to losses felt acutely or feared in the near future, would have coherent (if self-serving) programmes to reverse economic processes of the impoverishment of the working class. And yet, contemporary fascism seems to be even more heterogenous (as well as self-defeating) in the policies it promotes or implements when it comes to power than classical fascism (which did not espouse a coherent economic ideology, being largely reactive to what it viscerally disdained and focused on what could be easily packaged in short-term populist proposals). In this diverse landscape of policies, the extreme libertarianism of Argentina’s Javier Milei appears as an outlier, but it could simply be the more honest forerunner of the movement. While deregulation and libertarianism is almost always part of the extreme right discourse, which places an important focus on the corruption of the deep state and the entranced bureaucracy, and many parties from the extreme right have occupied electoral positions vacated by failed left-wing movements. This led them to integrate some social democratic protectionist ideas in their discourse, particularly in Europe, often weaponized however as part of anti-migrant discourse.

It is also important to mention the inflammatory role that the COVID-19 pandemic played on a pile of desiccated leaves that had been amassing long before. The pandemic—like an accelerationist wet dream—substantiated the apocalyptic propensity of the right and brought it into real life, making its appetite for disaster brutally apparent. It allowed for a previously unconceivable alternative to the global neoliberal order to manifest, when the entire system shut down almost everywhere, almost overnight. The extremism of the reaction to safety measures dialled up the tone of every other conversation. All of a sudden everything seemed possible, since the pandemic showed that the unthinkable was possible. When emerging from the lockdowns, the world took with it the violence reserved until then mostly for (semi)anonymous social media. The sense that things that had been repressed for a long time could all of a sudden become acceptable was felt in many parts of the world, from the US after the most recent elections to Bangladesh, where after one of the very few successful street revolutions that overturned the previous authoritarian government, discursive and actual violence in society was unleashed, under a new atmosphere infused with Islamic religious conservatism and MAGA spirit.[41]

The pandemic also brought science firmly into the culture wars. The man who almost became Romania’s president last year, Călin Georgescu, is an extreme example of questioning the fundamentals of science—not just the existence of the virus itself but also the chemical composition of water and the benefits (or rather lack thereof) of wearing glasses. His win of the first round of presidential elections in November 2024 caused major social upheavals in the country that hardly ended with the restaging of elections this past May, following his disqualification. This environment led to such episodes as the widespread questioning during a snowfall this past winter, specifically whether it contained real snow or not. Georgescu’s ideology[42] was a rather unique mix of distributism, nostalgic ruralism, adapted Duginism, as well as radical ecologism which would have put it at odds with the anti-Green deal European right and the ‘drill baby, drill’ programme in the US, amongst the many contradictions of the global fascist movement. It was also baffling in its provocative departure from established common sense. But one lesson to be learnt from recent history is that what appears as a new obscurantism is in fact a smokescreen for a concrete take-over plan.

Global fascisms spell an end of some sort for western liberal democracy as a horizon to aspire to. They originate from a fundamental loss of belief that this system has a unique ability to create a good life for enough people in a society. Outside of welfare states built in countries with an accumulation of colonial loot, it has been failing, hardly bringing the same level of wealth in most other places it has been implemented. This is globally felt. Even in China, some sort of horizon of liberal convergence had been, outspokenly or mostly implicitly, part of the system dynamic before the turn that President Xi is now heralding. This liberal horizon is now lost. This is also true in Russia, where a hope of convergence with the West in the immediate post-Soviet era has dissipated, first slowly and then all of a sudden. And both in China and to an even greater extent in Russia, that previous aspiration (seen now as jejune) is in itself a powerful fuel for resentment, like the special disdain of a scorned lover born from the shame and denial of unrequited love.

So how can the end of some vision of a ‘western consensus’, which now seems inevitable and can hardly be defended beyond the comfort of a devil-one-knows line of argument, be replaced by something other than fascist nihilism? What can we advance instead? It is hard to believe that a successful anti-fascist effort would entail defending the status quo ante. Can a successful scenario and roadmap be crafted from the left? What can we do, collectively, that is genuinely political, beyond retreating into the private sphere, or into micro communities, which seem to be the most commonly phrased response to the threat of fascisms globally?


Social Media and Communication Breakdowns

One of the most discussed facilitators for the rise of global fascisms worldwide has been the role of social media. But how precisely has this connection happened? For one, the two have spread globally roughly at the same time, in the second decade of the current century. Social media has allowed anger to boil, through the nefarious effects of algorithms, it has created echo chambers, commonly circulating false narratives, and evening wheezes continuously isolated and radicalized. Admittedly, anger and the culture of outrage (if not the penchant for alternative truths) has not been a phenomenon specific to the right, with many of its reflexes and practices being in fact developed around a wide range of progressive positions. The points above are well known. But social media’s role in fostering a new climate of fascism has been deeper than that.[43] Let us concentrate on four points.

Firstly, it has radically altered deeply ingrained patterns of communication for large numbers of people around the world. Communication has always been highly codified within cultural and social contexts, with various mechanisms of mediation in place, which kept social exchanges (and hierarchies) within stable parameters. Social media has brought a shock to these communication patterns around the world, an issue that is not fully acknowledged and taken into account in conversations about structural social changes of the past two decades. While surely allowing freedoms that were rarely enjoyed (of people communicating across barriers of class, caste, fame, geographic distances, etc.), it also removed the many codes that maintained social conventions in place.

Secondly, social media created a strong psychological perception of the entire world being interconnected. Access to social media vastly increased the complexity of available information, of news, and of the resulting anxiety arising from the relentless accumulation of issues. Fascism has always been about simple (even if entirely false) explanations and (fake) solutions to complex realities.

Thirdly, social media’s unique instruments to externalize, multiply, and ultimately democratize the production of untruths made the need for centralized propaganda resembling the one that was at the core of classical fascism unnecessary. When armies of trolls, either organized or for the most part independent of any coordination, participate in the fabrication and dissemination of lies, there is no more need for a ministry of public enlightenment and propaganda. And one of the most important features of most contemporary fascist movements has been to precisely avoid many formal and aesthetic parallels to classical fascism. An exception to this is arguably Russia which, given its decisive role in defeating Nazism, sees itself immune from it, while replicating classical fascist displays most faithfully at the formal level, with the letter ‘Z’ symbol—circulating since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which has been referred to as a ‘stylized semi-swastika’,[44] and the huge rallies around the leader.

Lastly, the development of AI around the second Trump term significantly changed the conversation around post-truth from his first term. How have the fundamentals of truth changed when the speaker is not a human voice?

God and World Liberty Financial

In many places around the world, the fascist wave is inextricably connected to religion. There are ample signs that we live in a global moment marked by a new wave of religiosity and its political manifestations: Christian and Evangelical politically active fanaticism across the Americas, the African continent,[45] and parts of Asia; Christian Orthodoxy feeding the new conservatism across much of the former Soviet world and being a central pillar of Russian fascism; religiously and messianically motivated crumbling of Israeli politics and public discourse; Islamic fundamentalism remaining an attractive political horizon in a large part of the world; Hindu neo-fascism in India; the employment of neo-Confucianism to prolong the legitimacy of communist rule in China; and Buddhist supremacy in South and South East Asia, including Thailand—where the symbiosis of this religion enjoying an eminently pacifist global reputation with military regimes and royal cliques and oligarchy[46] are both unsettling and eerily similar to Latin America’s trinity of religion, military, and the entrenched elites.

It must also be mentioned that a majority of these extreme forms of political religion around the world have placed Islamophobia at the centre of their discourse. Fears of losing religious coherence and identity in the face of cultural globalization make fascism appear as local phenomena and the specific politics of resentment can often pit different national manifestations of fascism against each other. And yet, as much as it is nativist, closed within the confines of distinct religious communities, or suspicious of international ideas, it is often propagated on international ideological networks, as it has been from the beginning of the last century.

Sri Lankan Buddhist fascism was inspired in the 1920s, in a period of anti-colonial wanderings, by Italian fascism.[47] It then blossomed in the Sinhalese context where it developed an ideology exclusionary of the Tamil and Muslim communities that eventually lead to the Tamil genocide (of which 2009 was a culmination). Sri Lankan Buddhist fascism also spread to South East Asia (on the same route of diffusion of Theravada Buddhism centuries earlier), where Myanmar fascism grew the strongest (embraced both by the military regime and by the Aung San Suu Kyi lead ‘democratic opposition’ that played a crucial role in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingyas in the 2017 genocide.)[48] Outside of the Theravada world, a more isolated example is that of Vajrayana Buddhist Bhutan’s expulsion of Hindu Lhotshampas in the 1980s and 1990s (up to a fifth of the country’s population, many of them seeking refuge in Nepal and later on in the US, from which Trump’s anti-immigration campaign has been recently sending them back to nowhere,[49] to a non-existing motherland),[50] and which remains one of the least acknowledged acts of ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary movement in India (currently numbering over six million members and closely associated with the Bharatiya Janata ruling party) was founded in 1925, explicitly borrowing in its first years ideas, methods, and formal features from both the Italian fascist movement and the NS. Its current focus is on Islamophobic purity. This finds resonance in a vastly distinct ideological landscape, with the persecution of the Uyghurs in China.

Latin America’s long history of fascist regimes of different nuances is perhaps most revealing of the changing patterns of international networks influencing fascist fermentation. From the early manifestations of Bonapartism across the region, usually by reactionary conservative dictators of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continuing in Brazil with Getulio Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937–46)—implementing a version of Mediterranean fascism; in Argentina, with the unique ideological blend of Peronism; or in Colombia with Laureano Gómez’s presidency (1950–53), who brought the country on the cusp of a fascist dictatorship before being removed. We then up the ante with the mass murdering anti-communist military dictatorships of the Cold War era like the one of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90) in Chile or Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala (1982–83),[51] whose legacies were continued afterwards by a new generation of strongmen including Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990–2000)[52] or Álvaro Uribe in Colombia (2002–10), who professed great admiration for laureanismo. In Colombia, however, fascist violence and social cleansing was also carried out by right-wing paramilitaries, like the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas De Colombia) (to which Uribe was connected[53]) and sometimes by groups indistinguishable from narco-traffickers, a model that can be traced to other countries in the region as well. Finally, in the contemporary era, we encounter Bolsonarism,[54] which remains a force and a threat in Brazil and reflects the double influence of Trumpist networks around the world, fostered by internationally-operating figures such as Steve Bannon, as well as by a plethora of increasingly extremist think tanks, as well as, crucially, those of various US Evangelist churches. Nayib Bukule, the President of Salvador, has been even more successful than Bolsonaro in establishing an authoritarian regime in his country. This is based on claims of social cleansing and the establishment of vast detention camps purportedly for gang members, which have also been infamously used by the Trump administration. His millennial fascist regime also reveals a unique set of power groups behind it, those of crypto networks. Their influence is unlikely to decrease anytime soon and their global reach already touches every continent, only enhanced by the embrace of crypto by the new US regime and its World Liberty Financial.

Intimately connected to these is the role that leading figures from Silicon Valley are playing in the propagation of these ideas, with figures such as Peter Thiel, a mentor of Vance and of course Musk, consolidating power and influence. Their millenarist ideas of burning down government structures and eventually aiming to dismantle democracy à la Curtis Yarvin are also spreading on the global crypto and political networks.[55] And the previous version of these, the old Chicago boys networks, whose role behind the Pinochet regime in Chile was fundamental in economic and social policy, also remain active today.[56] The Argentinian president named his six cloned dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Robert Lucas Jr, etc. Milei then ordered these dogs carved on the presidential baton used at his inauguration, in a gesture taking his influences as far back as Roman Emperor Caligula, who famously made his horse a senator.

The aforementioned Evangelical churches from the US are however perhaps the most influential and far reaching networks for spreading right-wing extremism. The wave of proposed anti-queer legislation in Ghana, Uganda, Romania, and elsewhere has been a direct consequence of lobbying efforts by such churches. Its highly coordinated nature is visible through the sharing of obviously disseminated talking points and phrasings such as the spectre of the family made up of ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’, threatening traditional gender roles, which is found across different countries. Evangelical networks also manage to spread their influence beyond believers, as seen in the adoption of its agenda and strategies in officially Christian Orthodox movements in Central and Eastern Europe or in political circles that are not officially affiliated to any religion, such as in many places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. But Christian extremism is also taking even more violent forms, including the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)[57] in Northern Uganda. And yet, how else to describe Yoweri Museveni’s rule (which the LRA is fighting against) and his growing cult of personality if not of a fascist persuasion? This stands in vertical continuity in historical cycles with Idi Amin’s generation (which Museveni fought against), and laterally to other regimes across the continent perpetuating the cult of leaders long past their expiration dates. But discourses of hate are taking even sharper forms across the African continent. In this context, apartheid South Africa, the most extensively and recognizably racist state in the world in the second half of the twentieth century, remains a source of inspiration for contemporary apartheid and a place where white supremacy groups remain active today both outside and inside parliamentary politics. Operation Dudula is also growing as a xenophobic movement against Black migrants from across the continent in South Africa.[58] Ethnic supremacist movements have also largely shaped Ethiopian political discourse in the last thirty years, of which the wars in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia are only the most violent manifestations. The lingering effects of the Rwandan genocide continue in paramilitary groups active in Eastern Congo, directly continuing or emulating genocidal Hutu militias like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi. But again, in what other category could we include Paul Kagame’s orderly regime of national reconstruction and suppression of dissent in the new Rwanda if not in the same vein as others discussed here? In Eastern Congo, these militias share a violent space with mercenaries from Europe, many of them explicitly organized in fascist paramilitary groups—not unrelated to the infamous Russian Wagner group, which has been operating on three continents. One such group was arrested while driving with carloads of weapons towards Bucharest around the time of the contested presidential elections.[59]


Simps, Soy Boys, and Kafukuswi

Alongside evangelical and crypto networks, and in related fields of self-improvement and getting-rich-fast is another rapidly growing network in the world, the ‘manosphere’, which has been spreading new definitions of masculinity. This has developed over the past decade via the internet into an ideologically fascist constellation of its own, greatly expanded in the past few post-pandemic years. The new network includes the incel movement, which has already led to deadly terrorist attacks in several countries, alongside countless incidents of femicides and violence towards women that have sharply increased and still go under the radar. The manosphere contains an entirely specific cultural landscape and vocabulary[60] (not unlike the one crafted and circulated by evangelical networks), rapidly shifting and evolving—and including definitions for men that don’t fit the new ideal, such as ‘simp’, ‘soy boy’, or ‘kafukuswi’ (in Kenya); the infamous ‘red pill’; trad wives; and many others. The spread of these ideas surpass most estimates, the extent of delusional levels of self-confidence being revealed in recent internet conversations around how many men who have never played tennis think they could win against Serena Williams; the number of men who think they could safely land a plane without prior experience; or the number of men needed to defeat a gorilla in a fight. Another such revealing moment has been the meme-ified online survey about the number of times many men think about the Roman Empire in a day, seen as a manly activity occupied with a golden era of masculinity. This violent movement has a set of leaders such as Andrew Tate, who alongside extreme and criminal misogyny, is preaching the values of entrepreneurship and hard libertarianism.[61] 

Across East Asia, anti-feminism is a growing political phenomenon, being the main front of the cultural wars in the 2022 South Korean presidential election before, which brought to power the avowedly anti-feminist right-wing president Yoon Suk Yeol, after his left-wing opponent positioned himself on the anti-feminist side as well. Yoon Suk Yeol was eventually impeached earlier this year, after having attempted to institute martial law, which would have unravelled South Korea’s hard won democratic system.[62]


PSL/SMV, Looksmaxxing, Amphetamines, and the Yoke of Yoga

It seems thus, that the shadow of global fascisms may also be found, dangerously insidious, within the self-disciplinary patterns with which we shape our bodies and perform ourselves in daily life. There are distinct libidinal forces behind every regime and even different bodies under different eras. Bodies are shaped by regimes resulting in noticeably different looking bodies under classical fascism, socialism, or neoliberalism, as well as in the bodies we encounter today around us and especially on our screens, pressuring us in ever so effective ways to emulate.

Since we seem to be unable to change the world, the proposition is that we can focus on changing our bodies (as well as our minds), and this will naturally lead to an improvement in our bank accounts, sex life, relationships, and whatnot. This search for a better version of ourselves has also created its own lexicon, including terms such as looksmaxxing, glow-up, or PSL/SMV – Physical Sexual Market Value Level. In this culture of pervasive youthfulness, disease, death, and old age have been ejected beyond the golden walls of our digital palace. In a prevalent New Age schema with its naively orientalizing culture, obsession with sublimating these realities of human life seems to be a call for Siddhartha Gautama to return to his family’s palace, to its comfort and control, and ignore these inevitabilities rather than seek any form of enlightenment.

On a micro level, control also manifests in a growing dependence on pharmaceuticals used to eliminate newly-designated deviations that were considered, until recently, acceptable variations of human personality. Take the pathologizing of attention disorders, whose medical solution—amphetamines—have been such an important part of classical fascist history,[63] as well as many other wars since.

On an anatomical level, the past few decades saw almost everywhere in the world a turn towards an extreme idealization of athletic beauty, going beyond even the aesthetics of classical fascist body worship, especially through the pervasiveness of the desire to have and to mate with a perfect body. This body cult and the hypermasculinity in public space, although rooted in different contexts and histories, are also signifiers of a new global obsession. When compared to previous canons of masculinity in many contexts, there seems to be a radical turn towards an exaggeration of muscle mass, and a feeling of shame and failure for not having it. The fetish of the male gym-perfect body is an almost global phenomenon, from the high-end gyms of Lagos to improvised playgrounds in US-American small towns. Many heartthrobs of the pre-neoliberal era, from Bollywood to French cinema, would hardly be noticed in today’s TikTok economy, being easily mogged by scrolling profiles of regular kids from around the world. In the past few years, these new ideals of masculinity have also increasingly included influences from the Korean beauty and pop culture industries, with the extensive grooming previously associated with feminine stereotypes, such as the twelve-step skin care routine or the use of make-up. These have been embraced in many contexts together with an increase in toxic masculinity and extreme body ideals, rather than resulting in any softening of gender binaries.

This striving for bodily perfection is matched by an obsession towards an idealized state of mental balance and perfection, to be obtained through a plethora of practices, including yoga (more of a global cosmopolitan phenomena than a contextualized spiritual technique)[64] and the booming self-help industry, populated by many figures espousing economic and political ideas of the right. Yoga seems to truly hold the global upper and middle classes in a yoke.[65]


Cleansing and Purity

The patterns supporting the turn towards global fascisms are also found in the claims of purity and social superiority of supposedly liberal metropolitan communities, separating themselves from the ills of mass consumerist society. The fanaticism for ‘clean’ food and cleansing diets (ignoring the otherwise existing normal functions of the colon) across the rising global middle-class is based less on science, and more on a fundamentalist approach to nutrition, resulting in widening class differences in basic lifestyle, in a new set of arguments which moralize the majority’s nutrition economy, as well as in new fronts of resentment, often going both ways.

Like so many of the other phenomena mentioned here, the pandemic has also been a catalyst for these obsessions, in this case less as a consequence of its indirect effects on society and more in direct descendance from the anti-vaccine movement, a major source of inspiration for new fascisms around the world. In the US, one of its leading voices, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a converted liberal from the US’s royal family of elite liberalism, was put in charge of the country’s health policy, further deepening the incoherence and paradoxes of the Trump administration, which is now banning some artificial colourings with no proven health risks while allowing much greater levels of pollution. The growing wellness movement, and its call for a return to nature and the ancestral, is increasingly infiltrated by fascist voices, who craft new ways of blending orientalist ignorance with obsessions with cleanliness, cleansing, purity, and violence.[66] This is of course nothing new, and it is needless to recall here that the NS adopted as its leading emblem a misappropriated ancient symbol.[67] While global yoga has few connections with the yoga lineages in South Asia, purity in regards to food is a deeply ingrained instrument for entrenched casteism and for the upholding of Brahminic supremacy, which lies at the core of the extremist turn in contemporary India.


Art and Ways Forward?

What is art’s role in this? How has art been complicit in this turn? How do aesthetic regimes play into it? Contemporary art of the past decades has been inundated by certain discourses of formal purity and ahistoricity, as well as by a turn towards obscene commercialization and megalomania. These veer more towards elite fetishization and the production of the fascist equation of dispossession and resentment than towards the mere abdication to bourgeois taste of forgettable art from previous eras. Those seem more removed from the fascist extreme on the spectrum of complicity than today’s gloss and art as an asset class. But this project’s interest lies less in ruminating about these and more towards thinking what art has to say and do to address the fascist turn and how to resist it. In the German-speaking world, decidedly anti-fascist artists of the post-war generation have long proposed satire and the isolation and exposure of the grotesque as anti-fascist weapons. Is there a space today to revisit their strategies? Are there other aesthetic legacies across contexts that offer alternative paths? This project gathers examples and propositions through art works and visual culture, in introducing the aforementioned areas in which fascism or its ideological embryos may be found today, as well as in confronting audiences with multiple local struggles and subjects, as ways of mirroring their own in relation to other contexts in the world.

But equally important as its production of aesthetic regimes and reflections of reality is art’s rather unique ability to create spaces for crafting new languages and for accommodating critical discussions, divergences, and for imagining alternative scenarios. This is perhaps the space where an articulation of the urgencies at hand can lay the grounds for necessary discussions. And this is a central task where the current project sees its possibilities.

So what directions could such discussions take? Fascism has never been inevitable. Like any form of political thinking and organization, it has the potential to be resisted and defeated through counter political imagination and action. The strategies for precluding contemporary fascism to effect the damage on humanity that the first wave has committed is one of the great tasks of our time.[68] This project can only propose a modest effort, a sketch commensurate to the possibilities to contribute to conversations in the contexts it can affect, which are meant to gather artistic, intellectual, and political contributions that would take the conversation much further.

One of those is the questioning of apocalyptic thinking in political imagination.[69] Entire ontologies of doom have been crafted in the past decades within a wide range of fields, including different strands of progressive politics and the fight against climate change, among others. As grave as the issues addressed certainly are, this end-of-days method of historical Erhabene lays the ground for fascist irrationality. It makes the often tedious processes of continuous negotiation that non-fascist politics necessarily entail irredeemably mundane. And apocalyptic prophecies are often self-fulfilling. In resisting this mode of thinking and its aestheticization of politics, embracing complexity and the fundamentally imperfect nature of political life remain urgent. Politics is plodding and unglamorous, and this needs to be rehearsed through projects where deliberation in community is practiced and perfected.

Another possibility worth fighting for is the continued, tireless thinking around a politics of love and joy, in spite of their increasing high-jacking by political forces filling the lack of ideas on the left with them. We must continue imagining how the work of building micro communities around these commitments could shape a broader politics.

Another crucial task remains to create spaces for genuine epistemic diversity. While discussions in the last years have toyed with the idea of cosmological diversity, often at superficial or ethnographic levels, few platforms have been imagined—and even fewer have been built—to accommodate divergent systems of ideas and multiple structural viewpoints. Where the ideology of human rights and representational diversity have failed, there are multiple genealogies across contexts of the world over many centuries that have shaped platforms, institutions, and techniques for debating and accommodating different starting points and conclusions. Countering fascist thinking in a global era must take all these into account if we are to succeed before it is too late.

 

 

[1] See Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso, 2019).

[2] See Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2023).

[3] See Xavier Moreno Juliá, ‘Spain’, in David Stahel (ed.), Joining Hitler’s Crusade: European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[4] See Carlos Caballero Jurado, La División Azul: Historia completa de los voluntarios españoles de Hitler. De 1941 a la actualidad (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2019).

[5] See https://www.clarin.com/mundo/espana-gobierno-mariano-rajoy-sacara-francisco-franco-valle-caidos_0_rkYhtH7eZ.html; https://www.thinkspain.com/news-spain/13882/congress-approves-historical-memory-bill.

[6] See Marzia Casolair, In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Relationships Between Indian Radical Nationalism, Italian Fascism and Nazism (London: Routledge, 2022).

[7] See ‘Expert warns of impending ‘genocide’ of Muslims in India’, Al Jazeera, 16 January 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/16/expert-warns-of-possible-genocide-against-muslims-in-india.

[8] See Allan Kaval, ‘Meloni reacts to racist and anti-Semitic remarks made by young members of her party’, Le Monde, 5 July 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/07/05/in-italy-giorgia-meloni-reacts-to-racist-and-anti-semitic-remarks-made-by-young-members-of-her-party_6676740_4.html.

[9] See, for example, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/30/new-york-jury-finds-donald-trump-guilty-in-new-york-hush-money-trial; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/17/icc-issues-arrest-warrant-for-russias-putin-over-ukraine-crimes; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/21/icc-issues-arrest-warrant-for-israeli-pm-netanyahu-for-war-crimes-in-gaza; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/12/icc-takes-custody-of-former-philippines-president-rodrigo-duterte; and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/brazils-bolsonaro-accused-in-spy-agency-case-as-coup-trial-is-ongoing.

[10] Fort he latest, see ‘Bundesverwaltungsgericht weist AfD-Beschwerden zurück’, Der Spiegel, 23 July 2025, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-bundesverwaltungsgericht-weist-afd-beschwerden-zurueck-a-58068c6c-5986-4713-becc-9c3de02dd499.

[11] See Micheal Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1494–2007 (3rd edition) (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008).

[12] See Dezso Bartha, ‘Trianon And The Predestination Of Hungarian Politics: A Historiography Of Hungarian Revisionism, 1918–1944’, diss., University of Central Florida, 2006.

[13] See Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile Books, 2014).

[14] For a consideration of the Italian example, see Albert Szymanski, ‘Fascism, Industrialism and Socialism: The Case of Italy,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 15, no. 4 (Sept. 1973); 395–404.

[15] Stefan Zweig’s memoir, first published in German in 1942, remains one of the most compelling accounts of these shifts. See Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European (London: Pushkin Press, 2011).

[16] Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (originally published in French in 1950), is a hallmark reference in this regard; see Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

[17] See Stephen Minton, ed., Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples From Genocide via Education to the Possibilities for Processes of Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation, and Reclamation (London: Routledge, 2021).

[18] See, among others, Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010).

[19] See Gáspar Miklós Tamás, Kommunismus nach 1989: Beiträge zu Klassentheorie, Realsozialismus, Osteuropa [Communism after 1989: Contributions to class theory, real socialism, Eastern Europe] (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2015).

[20] See Jean-Baptise Chastand, ‘Viktor Orbán is reviving Budapest’s architecture with a nationalist flavour’, Le Monde, 4 April, 2022, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/04/04/in-hungary-viktor-orban-is-reviving-budapest-s-architecture-with-a-nationalist-flavor_5979668_4.html.

[21] See Trump’s ‘Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’, 21 December 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture.

[22] Recent studies confirm a still-existing gap in leadership positions in Germany; see for example, https://www.dw.com/en/study-shows-germanys-east-west-divide-in-top-positions/a-66875990.

[23] See Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (3rd edition) (New York: Norton, 2012).

[24] Wang Qiyue and Li Mingjiang, ‘The Commercialization of Cyber Nationalism in China’, Carnegie China, 24 October 2004, carnegieendowment.org/posts/2024/10/japanese-boy-stabbed-in-shenzhen-alarm-bells-ring-for-the-traffic-driven-business-of-cyber-nationalism-in-china?lang=en.

[25] Nectar Gan, ‘China is more in love with its pandas than ever. That’s complicated matters for Beijing’, 26 January 2025, edition.cnn.com/2025/01/26/china/china-panda-diplomacy-intl-hnk.

[26] See Guobin Yang, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

[27] See, for example, Mark Andrews, ‘Why a former Red Guard now saves Chinese antiques and uses his collection to educate young people’, South China Morning Post, 12 April 2018, www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2141217/why-former-red-guard-now-saves-chinese-antiques-and-uses-his-collection.

[28] See Benjamin Haas, ‘China “ruthless” campaign to evict Beijing’s migrant workers condemned,’ The Guardian, 27 November 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/27/china-ruthless-campaign-evict-beijings-migrant-workers-condemned.

[29] A fundamental reference in this regard is of course Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

[30] See B.R. Meyers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011) and Suzy Kim, ‘(Dis)Orienting North Korea’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 3 (2010): 481–495.

[31] See Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

[32] See Irfan Habib, Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017).

[33] See ‘India: Hindu event calling for genocide of Muslims sparks outrage’, Al Jazeera, 24 December 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/24/india-hindu-event-calling-for-genocide-of-muslims-sparks-outrage.

[34] See Soner Cataptay, A Sultan in Autumn: Erdoğan Faces Turkey’s Uncontainable Forces (London: I.B. Tauris, 2021).

[35] See Jardar Østbø, The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth (Stuttgart/Hannover: Ibidem Press, 2016).

[36] See Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Crown, 2018).

[37] Victimhood and genuine past oppression do represent important sources of justification for right wing narratives around the world, from state and national narratives, in Israel or Poland for example, to groups such as the TERF movement, which is getting stronger, in places like South Korea or the UK where it scored a recent victory in regards to the definition of women following a decision by the country’s supreme court. Like many national narratives, TERF, grounding itself in misogyny, uses victimhood and the grievances of an oppressed group to further oppress others, in their case trans women.

[38] See the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s entry on the concept of Lebensraum in its Holocaust Encylopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensraum; Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism From Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

[39] Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023).

[40] See J.B: Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).

[41] See https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20241222-minorities-fear-targeted-attacks-in-post-revolution-bangladesh.

[42] See Elena Trifan, ‘From self-help to sovereignty: the rise of Călin Georgescu and Romania’s far-right mysticism’, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 33, no. 1 (2025): 221–233.

[43] See Christian Fuchs, Digital Fascism: Media, Communication and Society (London: Routledge, 2022).

[44] See Robert Coalson, ‘Special Operation 2: Moscow’s Pro-War Symbol Conquers Russia – And sets Alarm Bells Ringing,’ RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, 17 March 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-letter-z-fascist-symbol/31758267.html.

[45] See Jacob K. Olumpona, ed., African Evangelicalism and the Transformation of Africa (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2025).

[46] For a consideration of the Sri Lankan example, see Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

[47] See Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?.

[48] Nasir Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People: A Case of Genocide, Ethnocide, and ‘Subhuman’ Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

[49] Lex Harvey and Chiranjivi Ghimire, ‘Forced from Bhutan, deported by the US: These stateless Himalayan people are in a unique limbo,’ CNN, 18 July 2025, edition.cnn.com/2025/07/18/asia/bhutan-refugees-trump-deportations-nepal-intl-hnk.

[50] See Michael Hutt, Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[51] Javier A. Galván, Latin American Dictators of the 20th Century: The Lives and Regimes of 15 Rulers ((Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).

[52] Julio F. Carrión, The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2006).

[53] Iván Cepeda and Jorge Rojas, A las puertas de El Ubérrimo (Madrid: Debate, 2008).

[54] See Feliciano de Sá Guimarães, André Felipe Miquelasi, Gustavo Jordan Ferreira Alves, Irma Dutra Gomes de Oliveira e Silva and Karina Stange Calandrin, ‘The evangelical foreign policy model: Jair Bolsonaro and evangelicals in Brazil’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 6 (2023): 1324–1344.

[55] See Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism.

[56] Sebastián Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

[57] Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, eds., The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality (New York: Zed Books, 2010).

[58] See https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/4/8/what-is-operation-dudula-s-africas-anti-immigration-vigilante.

[59] See https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/horatiu-potra-audiat-de-politisti-se-indrepta-cu-20-de-oameni-si-un-arsenal-de-arme-de-foc-spre-bucuresti-foto.html.

[60] See Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language (New York: Knopf, 2025).

[61] See Hugh Donnell, ‘Andrew Tate’s “Manosphere” Is Built on a Shallow Idea of Human Freedom,’ Jacobin, 11 June 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/11/manosphere-human-freedom-andrew-tate-sartre-misogyny-individualism.

[62] See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/19/south-korea-ex-leader-yoon-indicted-as-martial-law-probe-continues.

[63] See, for example, Normal Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (New York: Penguin, 2016).

[64] See Stewart Home, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness (London: Pluto Press, 2025).

[65] Its history in Europe is however much longer than the era of global fascisms, the neoliberal era, or the nineteenth-century spiritualist and orientalist eras. The first known European practitioner of yoga was a Greek soldier from Alexander the Great’s armies, bringing back this practice learnt on their conquests. Moreover, and with the risk of seeming that we think too much about the Roman Empire, contemporary research now indicates that yoga and meditation practices have directly influenced the adoption of the novel idea of monasticism and retreat from the world in Christianity, via the major trade routes of the Red Sea linking India with the Roman Empire. See William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).

[66] See, for example, Mark Hay, ‘Soap to supremacy: The rise of white wellness,’ 2 February 2025, www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2025/2/2/how-white-nationalists-infiltrated-the-wellness-movement.

[67] See, for example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s entry on the history of the swastika, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/history-of-the-swastika.

[68] When I first imagined a show with this title, general premise, and many of the artists, together with Inti Guerrero, over a decade ago, the world looked different. Back then the title was more of a provocation—in the long left tradition of provocation, which has since been strongly co-opted by right-wing voices—made to raise awareness rather than to be a descriptor of so many contexts, as it sadly is today.

[69] Instructive in this regard is the analysis in Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (London: Verso, 2024).