Up, close and personal: the new Front National visual strategy under Marine Le Pen

Extensive analyses of Marine Le Pen’s media interventions as leader of the French Front National have revealed mostly rhetorical differences from her father’s discourse. In particular, despite Marine Le Pen’s professed openness toward women and their policy concerns, and despite her professed intention to transform the FN into party suitable for government, there has been little progress in these directions. However, the FN’s visual discourse has been all but ignored by the scholarly analysis, despite the fact that campaign visuals encode significant social and political information. This paper finds that the FN candidates’ visual presentation has undergone major transformations from the 2007 to the 2012 legislative elections. Specifically FN candidates in 2012 are more likely to visually portray themselves like mainstream party candidates. Compared to the 2007 elections, women candidates, in particular, were more likely to visually promote their personal qualities in 2012, in some respects more than 2012 men candidates

Legalised non-consensual sterilisation - eugenics put into practice before 1945, and the aftermath. Part 1: USA, Japan, Canada and Mexico.

In the late 19th century, eugenics, a pseudo-scientific doctrine based on an erroneous interpretation of the laws of heredity, swept across the industrialised world. Academics and other influential figures who promoted it convinced political stakeholders to enact laws authorising the sterilisation of people seen as ‘social misfits’. The earliest sterilisation Act was enforced in Indiana, in 1907; most States in the USA followed suit and so did several countries, with dissimilar political regimes. The end of the Second World War saw the suspension of Nazi legislation in Germany, including that regulating coerced sterilisation. The year 1945 should have been the endpoint of these inhuman practices but, in the early post-war period, the existing sterilisation Acts were suspended solely in Germany and Austria. Only much later did certain countries concerned – not Japan so far - officially acknowledge the human rights violations committed, issue apologies, and develop reparation schemes for the victims’ benefit

Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right

peer reviewedThis chapter will analyze the place of the threat alleged of Cultural Marxism in the discourse of the radical and extreme right, in the United States as well as in continental Europe and the United Kingdom. The underlying aim of this chapter is to examine the determinant role that this ‘threat’ plays in the Anglo Saxon extreme right, in particular at the intellectual, ideological and doctrinal levels, in comparison to other countries. Certainly if the Netherlands, France or other countries have parties or political groups which borrow the rhetoric of ‘fighting’ against Cultural Marxism, or its more nebulous variant, ‘political correctness’, it certainly finds its origins in the United States, and more broadly the Anglo-Saxon world. To achieve this, the chapter will begin by unpicking the meanings behind the notion of Cultural Marxism, from its origins to its use in Anders Breivik’s manifesto released shortly before the Oslo and UtØya massacres. It will show that the term emerged from the literature of American ultraconservatives following the fall of the Berlin Wall as a consequence of the disappearance of the ‘red menace’ of Communism. Secondly, it will focus on two important moments in the development of the term. It will describe the phrase’s usage from the beginning of the 2000s within the discourse of Pat Buchanan, a political commentator and multiple U.S. presidential candidate. Then it will illustrate the re-emergence of the term some 10 years later, in the manifesto of Anders Breivik and in the subsequent justification of his acts throughout his trial. In both cases, we will see that Buchanan and Breivik emphasize the same basic theme, Cultural Marxism, in their denouncement of what they see as two different threats. Finally, from these explorations of the usage of the term, the discussion will examine other current uses of the notion of ‘Cultural Marxism’ in the British and American radical right. To conclude, it will show how the ‘Cultural Marxism’ threats are used by a variety of activists to argue for the defence of their political standpoints, setting this in a language of preserving freedom and democracy, but ultimately only within a framework designed to defend Judeo-Christian values

‘Penny-wise…’: Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Legacy to Fascism

The article traces the history of Ezra Pound’s engagement with Fascist politics and its contemporary influence on the far-right in America, Britain and Italy.  It seeks to explore a political legacy of Pound’s, which is sometimes strangely at odds with his poetic legacy but on other occasions, informs and coalesces into the latter.   Keywords: Ezra Pound; Modernism; Fascism