By RICHARD SEYMOUR*

The new right is truly captivated and obsessed with hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster

Today’s world is full of real disasters. But from military preparedness to fantasies of mass deportation, the right and far right promise their supporters better catastrophes: ones in which they will be in charge. So it is necessary to ask what “disaster nationalism” is and why it has not yet become fascism. [I]

A few years ago, I noticed that the new far right was obsessed with fantastical scenarios in which imaginary extreme evil prevailed. FEMA death camps (Federal Emergency Management Agency in the US), the “great replacement theory”, the “great reset”, 15-minute cities,[ii] 5G antennas that function as mind control beacons and microchips installed in people through vaccines.

In India, there is a theory called “romeo jihad”, according to which Muslim men seduce young Hindus and convert them to Islam, thus waging a kind of population war. QAnon fantasizes that Satanist and communist pedophiles rule the world. In other words, the new right is truly captivated and obsessed with hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster. Why does this happen?

There is no shortage of real disasters: fires, floods, wars, recessions, and pandemics. Yet they often deny that these disasters exist. Many say that COVID-19 was just an excuse for the Fourth Reich, or that climate change is an excuse for a totalitarian liberal regime, a new form of communism, and so on. But right-wingers are truly captivated and obsessed with hallucinatory scenarios of extreme catastrophes.

I often use the example of the Oregon wildfires. The fires swept through plains and forests and burned at 800 degrees Celsius. They posed a real threat to people’s lives. But many people refused to leave because they were told that it was actually “antifa” who were setting the fires and that it was all part of a seditious conspiracy to wipe out white conservative Christians.

So instead of running for their lives, they set up armed checkpoints and pointed their guns at people, claiming they were looking for the so-called “antifa.” Why do we have this fantasy of a mass apocalypse? Because it turns the disaster into something that actually becomes very exciting. Most of the time, when people suffer catastrophes, they get depressed and withdraw a bit from life and the public sphere. But the far right offers another way out.

She says that “those demons in your head that you’re fighting are real and you can kill them.” The problem is not difficult, abstract or systemic; no, it simply comes from bad people, and so we need to get rid of those people. We invent a fantasy about the painful emotions that people face in the face of economic crises and climate change, and we find a way to give them an outlet that feels valid and empowering.

This is what I call disaster nationalism. It is not yet fascist because, although it organizes people’s desires and emotions in a very reactionary direction, it does not attempt to overthrow parliamentary democracy, it does not seek to crush and extirpate all human and civil rights… not yet.

 These right-wing groups also lack organizational and ideological maturity. They are still in a phase of fascist accumulation of forces. If we go back to the interwar period, we see that this process of accumulation occurred, because there were mass pogroms; that is, there were already important far-right movements before fascism. Therefore, it seems that an initial phase of incipient fascism is still unfolding.

At the end of The Anatomy of Fascism, Published in 2005, Robert Paxton warns us that Israeli politics could descend into fascism. It is necessary to consider what place Israel occupies in this fascism that is not yet quite fascism. When I began writing this book, I did not expect to talk much about Israel. I thought it would be a minor element in a global mosaic made up of much larger states. In the end, I had to write a whole new chapter because of the genocide in Gaza.

It has long been clear that Zionism is still practicing incipient genocide because its ultimate desire is for the Palestinians not to exist. And there have been elements of Hebrew fascism since the 1920s. I would say that its colonial dynamics are quite unique. You don’t see that, for example, in the United States. Of course, settler colonialism is a historical reality with permanent repercussions, but it is not a living, breathing reality. You cannot live in Israel without knowing the Palestinians and their recalcitrant, irritating desire to exist.

But there are other aspects that are quite similar to the patterns observed in the United States, Great Britain, India, Brazil, etc. It is the decline of the state, the decline of the political system. It is the decline of the post-war system, in this case a corporatist arrangement between Jewish labor, Jewish capital and the state, achieved through the ethnic cleansing of 1948. This system collapsed in the 1970s and, as everywhere, became neoliberal. The Israeli trade unions refused. However, they tried to adapt through the politics of the “third way”. Now, their last chance was probably the Oslo process. Today, there is hardly any such prospect.

These trends of increasing pessimism and class inequality have already occurred, but the old nationalist utopia of the postwar world has disappeared. The capitalist class has become cosmopolitan and closely integrated with Washington, not with the Jewish nationalist utopia they were trying to build.

That is why some in the Zionist movement are trying to reconstitute this Jewish homeland, a Jewish safeguard, if you will. The right says, “No, we are past that. We are in a situation where we have to settle the issue with the Palestinians once and for all.” For them, that means expelling the Palestinians and decisively colonizing every piece of land that they believe belongs to Greater Israel.

Does this lead to fascism? No, not yet as long as there are liberal constitutional democratic systems. It is an exclusionary democracy. And that is not so unusual. The United States until the 1970s was an exclusionary democracy. Well, I would even say it still is today, but to a different degree. Israel has an increasingly racist, authoritarian, and genocidal culture and is closer to a fascist coup than anywhere else. I think that genocide and the process of radicalization of the grassroots will lead to a coup. kahanist or far right.

If you want to see where fascism is very advanced, I would say you see it in Israel, but also in India. You have to listen to the alarm bells: “We are on the brink of genocide,” because the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], a right-wing authoritarian movement linked to historical fascism, has colonized the state and suppressed civil rights. It is a global phenomenon in which Israel plays a unique and distinct role. Israel is very close to a millennia-old fascist regime. In the medium term, this is a real and dangerous possibility, given that it is a nuclear state.

It seems foolish to ignore the right’s catastrophic fantasies. They are often attuned to realities that liberal optimism prefers not to acknowledge. This is very real.

Sometimes they put their finger on important elements of reality. Conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities, for example, are incomprehensible and delusional because people think they herald some kind of communist dictatorship against the automobile. But at their core, they are a real threat to automobile use, the suburban lifestyle, and the relative advantages of car ownership.

If you build cities around convenience and have bike lanes everywhere, eliminating pollution as much as possible and eliminating parking spaces, this becomes a problem for those who like to drive everywhere. It will be especially problematic if you start putting up traffic barriers to prevent people from using certain roads. If you are directly and personally affected, you may feel like life will change radically in the next few decades.

And they’re not entirely wrong: Climate change will require major structural changes. Liberals want to deny the gravity of what’s coming and what people are already experiencing. I think the left’s response should be to say, “Yes, you’re right, we’re going to transform everything, but it will be much better for you. Here’s how.”

The example that always comes to mind is Barack Obama in 2016. He mocked Donald Trump for being a pessimist in his campaign, saying wryly, “The next day, people will open their windows, the birds will sing, the sun will shine.” pathos What he was trying to invoke was that people were actually very happy, that everything was going well. So in the election, he got his answer: Donald Trump won.

For a lot of people, things are not going well. Donald Trump gave his inauguration speech, written by Steve Bannon, talking about “American carnage,” which I think is kind of reactionary poetry, because carnage is not an inaccurate description of the destruction of industrial America.

They put their finger on a real problem, but their response was to blame China, East Asia. Most of the jobs lost were the result of class warfare from above: downsizing, union busting. There was an element of outsourcing, but the blame lies with the companies, the employers, not the workers in East Asia.

So you can see that they are able to identify certain forms of disaster. What they are not able to do is integrate them into a coherent and solid global analysis. All they propose, in reality, are symptoms designed to solve nothing, but which allow you to massacre Muslims in India, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, kill supporters of the Workers' Party in Brazil, shoot, stab or use cars to run over protesters of the Black Lives Matter in the US, or organizing racist riots in Britain, where they tried to burn asylum seekers in their shelters. This is what the right proposes as an alternative to disaster; that is, they propose better disasters, disasters where you feel in control.

It is necessary to talk about the killings of Muslims in India. It is necessary to ask what the Gujarat pogrom was all about and why it should be seen as the starting point for the current wave of disaster nationalism. It seems that there is a canary in the coal mine.

Of course, this is far from the only major pogrom in India. There is a kind of pogrom machine: Paul Brass speaks of it elegantly. What happened. A fire broke out on a train in which several Hindu pilgrims died. Since they were members of the far-right VHP party, the movement Hindutva [Hindu nationalist] speculated that Muslims had set fire to the train with Molotov cocktails.

There was little evidence of this: impartial investigations concluded that the fire was an accident. But they decided that genocide had occurred against Hindus, and in the following days they incited the population to take up arms and persecute, kill and torture Muslims. This they did, organized directly by BJP members, incited by BJP leaders, with the complicity and participation of the police and businessmen who paid individuals to take part in the operation. It was a collective outburst of coordinated and permissive public violence with some control by the authorities. The result was that the BJP’s vote share increased by 5%, even though it was expected to lose the state government after its mishandling of a real disaster: an earthquake the previous year.

So you see the pattern: there's a real catastrophe that affects people, the government mishandles it terribly, then they make up a fake version of the catastrophe and get people to kill someone, and it's very exciting. The things they did were horrific. They killed babies in front of their mothers, they drove stakes between women's legs, they cut people in half with swords.

Obviously, this had been going on for a long time, so in the months that followed, Narendra Modi organized Hindu pride rallies and told people that if we could restore the pride of the Hindu people, all Alis, Malis e Jamalis would not be able to harm us – he was obviously referring to the Muslim population that had just suffered a pogrom. The fact that these comments did not discredit the BJP but electrified its base and made Modi a sex symbol for the first time says a lot about this kind of politics.

We have seen this over and over again. Without all the armed demonstrations, anti-lockdown rallies and violence against protesters in the Black Lives Matter (BLM), we would not have seen the failed insurgency of January 6. Something similar was seen in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro fell a few points behind, almost won in 2022 and got more votes than in 2018. How did he do it?

A chaotic summer of violence in which he declared that left-wing activists should be machine-gunned, and his supporters brandished their weapons in the faces of Workers’ Party supporters, assaulted them or killed them. I’m not saying the Gujarat pogrom precipitated these other events, but it was an early example of what was happening, and as soon as Modi was elected in 2014. Moreover, it showed that liberal capitalism would tolerate such excess.

Most of the genocidal violence since the 1990s has been against Muslims of various ethnicities, and while there is plenty of racism against different groups in Western politics, the most vehement attacks seem to be reserved for Muslims. Tommy Robinson, for example, boasts that black people are welcome at his rallies. What role does the abstract figure of the “Muslim” play in the catastrophic nationalist discourse? Why has it replaced the “Jew” as the far-right hate figure?

I don’t think this will happen in Brazil or the Philippines. But it is happening in a whole constellation of states, from India to Israel, to the United States and most countries in Western Europe and even Eastern Europe. In semiotic terms, it is not exactly the same as the figure of the “Jew,” because, for now, the discourse of the far right does not give the impression that Muslims, besides being a kind of miserable mass of the Earth, control everything.

There have been attempts to develop a kind of conspiracy theory, like Bat Ye'Or's about Eurabia, for example. But most of the time it is not a belief that Muslims are secretly in charge and running the financial system, but rather that they are a subversive, violent, abnormal and inferior mass that needs to be subdued with violence and borders to keep them under control.

I would say that this has its origins in the turn of the 1980s towards ethnic absolutism, the coalition between Likud supporters in Israel and Christian fundamentalists in the United States, towards a kind of absolutist identity politics in which everyone has to fit into a certain box: there is a kind of collapse of the unifying anti-racist solidarity that we saw in the Cold War era in Britain, taking the form of political blackness. All of that collapsed, and then came the Rushdie affair and Muslims were categorized as a specific problem.

It is important that this is rooted in the everyday experience of capitalist life. In Britain, for example, people who were members of the same trade union in the northern cities or in the docks, once those industries were closed and the unions were dismantled, often moved to marginal sectors of the economy and found that their housing was still segregated, that the school system was effectively segregated, that the councils were practicing segregationist policies and that the police were segregationist in that sense, that is, very racist.

If we add austerity to this, we end up with public misery, nobody has anything, and those at the bottom are always blamed: “They have everything, I have nothing.” That’s when we start to see riots in the cities of the North and the war on terror seems to be catalyzing all of this.

So this is a global phenomenon in which liberal civilization has defined itself against “bad Muslims.” In the beginning, there was this idea that the problem was not all Muslims, but only what was called Islamic fascism: George W. Bush emphasized this. But the way that idea was understood by the population and the way it was politicized extended to all Muslims. So the Muslim is a central figure, but I think we have to see him as part of a chain of equivalences with the “transsexual bathroom predator,” the “cultural Marxist,” and the immigrant.

In the Philippines, the main category is drug addicts. There may be different nuances, but I agree with the thesis that says: globally and particularly in the West, “the Muslim” sums up all the problems.

One of the most interesting chapters in my book deals with the role of gender in nationalist discourse on disasters. There is also a chapter on the Gaza genocide, although it places a little less emphasis on psychoanalysis than in other chapters. Issues of sexual exploitation and assault were recurrent throughout the Gaza genocide, from Israeli soldiers posting videos on TikTok wearing Palestinian women’s underwear to riots in defense of soldiers accused of raping detainees in prison. What is the role of gender in the nationalist imaginary of disaster?

I would argue that in terms of the libidinal economics of this new far right, its underlying premise seems to be that someone always gets raped, and that the problem is that “communists” (including Kamala Harris, etc.) want the wrong people to get raped. The “incel” movement of involuntary celibates, men’s rights activists, etc. often try to justify rape.

There is a kind of contradiction in this libidinal economy between renewed severe prohibitions – no more gay marriage, no more transsexuals, women back in the kitchen, traditional wife “fetishism” – on the one hand, and on the other, total predatory freedom for men and therefore selective permissiveness. It is not surprising to see this in war zones. Wars usually result in countless violations: the victimization of the enemy includes the brutalization of women.

I’ve recently been researching perpetrators of crimes, particularly the Gaza genocide, and one of the things that comes up is the idea of ​​the dangerous woman. In modern terms, this is the social justice warrior, the redhead who screams loudly, etc. However, for the movement Freikorps In the 1920s German novel, the dangerous woman was a communist with a gun in her skirt. This woman was someone who had to be killed by anyone who could get close to her. This dangerous proximity is exciting because you get close to danger, then overcome it and take what you want, in the worst possible way.

I imagine that much of right-wing male politics today is an attempt to overcome a sense of inefficiency, powerlessness, paralysis and so on. And frankly, when they talk about rape, they imply that there are a lot of rapists. But the evidence suggests that young men, young men in general, are not as interested in sex as previous generations. They're not as interested in sex, they're not as interested in romance, there's nothing very sexy about contemporary life.

One of the things here is that they blame women for not having desire and say, “We’re involuntary celibates.” They say that if women would flirt with them, they’d be willing to have sex all the time. I doubt it. They’re just as confused, upset, and fucked up as everyone else, if not more so. But I think they’re trying to inflate their desire by turning it into a show of power, efficiency, strength.

There's a lot of that. I think there will be specific things in Gaza, because the whole thing about Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the lingerie stolen from Palestinian women is obviously parodic, it's genocidal, but there's something about it that involves an unconscious identification with the victim.

My book lacked an analysis of the role of liberal centrists in this situation. I’m thinking in particular of Kamala Harris, who campaigned with the Cheneys before losing to Donald Trump. It’s there in the background, but I wondered if it was possible to explain how liberals fit into this picture.

There are two angles to this question. The first points to liberal centrists as individuals and as a group and their symbiotic relationship with the far right. The second is the one I focus on in the book, on the failures of liberal civilization. Its inherent barbarity manifests itself in imperialism and war, in racism, in borderline sadism, in labor and exploitation, but also in class hierarchies and the misery they generate.

The question, then, is how we got to concrete situations where people like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Kamala Harris and Joe Biden contribute to the rise to power of this new extremist formation. I would say that philosopher Tad DeLay raises an interesting question in his recent book, The future of denial, on climate policy: “What do liberals want?” It’s a good question, because liberals constantly proclaim their affinity for egalitarian and libertarian values. They claim to support the fight against climate change, but they also oppose any effective means of achieving it.

I increasingly believe that ultimately liberals do not want liberalism. Of course, distinctions need to be made, because there are liberals who are genuinely committed philosophically and politically to liberal values, who will fight for them, and who will move to the left if necessary. But there are also staunch centrists whose politics are organized primarily around a phobia of the left. I am talking here about a hallucinatory anti-communism, mostly related to the right, but liberals have an equally unrealistic view of the left and its supposed threat.

It would be nice if the left were stronger and we were on the brink of a communist revolution, but we are not. When Bernie Sanders ran for president of the United States, I remember the panic among American liberals. One presenter feared that once the socialists took power, they would round people up and shoot them. Think also of how the hard centre (centre-left and centre-right) has fostered conspiracy theories, such as in Britain, Operation Trojan Horse: the idea that Muslims were taking over Birmingham schools. This conspiracy theory did not come from the far right, but from liberal governments.

The relationship is this: the far right takes the predicates already established by the liberal centre, radicalises them and makes them more internally coherent. A few years ago, at the beginning of the period when New Labour was in power, they started to crack down on asylum seekers. They regularly put pictures on the news of a minister in Dover looking for asylum seekers in vans of people and things like that. Meanwhile, the British National Party (BNP) was growing and saying in interviews, “We like what they’re doing, they’re legitimising us”. They took the concerns that were at the bottom of people’s minds in 1997 and brought them to the top, which gave the BNP legitimacy.

For their own reasons, they tend to amplify the reactionary currents that were already circulating. So when the far right develops on that basis, they tend to say, “This is a good reason to go further in this direction, because it shows that if we don’t solve this problem, the far right will develop even more.” It’s like an echo chamber, bouncing off each other. One of the problems with the choice between a centrist Democrat and a far-right Republican is that it is based on the exclusion of the left. Structurally, both feed on that exclusion, but in the long run it’s the far right that benefits.

At the end of the book, I say that appealing to people’s rationality and self-interest does not always work, and that “bread and butter” politics, while necessary, may not be enough: to mobilize people politically, you need to arouse their passions. What should the “roses” that should be offered along with the “bread” look like?

I should have used this metaphor in the book: “bread and roses” is a good way of putting it. I believe that there is a legitimate and innate aspiration to transcendence that is immanent to life as such. In other words, to be alive is to aspire to an ever-changing situation. Life is a teleological process in which we strive to reach a certain level of development. But also, the aspiration to knowledge, the aspiration to the other – this is the social instinct, the aspiration, in Plato’s language, to the good, the true and the beautiful.

I believe that this instinct is present in everyone, in all living beings. I would say that we can see it when there are left-wing ruptures, like the Bernie Sanders campaign. It's all very well to talk about bread and butter. There are good things that people need, like healthcare and a higher minimum wage. It's about fighting against employer exploitation, but also beyond that, it's about confronting sadism towards those who live beyond the borders. It's about telling people that they need and deep down want to live in a decent society.

People with decent instincts were drawn to this kind of campaign, they were thus electrified by it; but what did it say? It did not say, “Vote for me and you will have more material goods”; on the contrary, it said, “Vote for me and you will have a political revolution.” And not just vote for me, join a political movement with me, seize power, overthrow all the decrepit and sadistic elements in our society, and move deeper into democracy.

Bernie Sanders spoke of an unlikely journey together to remake and transform the country. People really want to work together to achieve something bigger. One of the pathologies of modern life is that people feel frustrated, paralyzed, ineffective. His signature phrase was “if we stick together,” and when he said that, the crowd erupted. This is just one example of the left’s rupture. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has his own style, Jeremy Corbyn has a very different style, but the basic idea is always the same: ethos social, the common effort.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about this dialectic in which you join a union at first to get higher wages, a shorter work day, things that you fundamentally need, but then you develop other, richer needs. Often workers go on strike to defend their union, even if they lose days of pay and their objective material conditions deteriorate a little.

They need each other, they need their unity. Now, this can go further; it can be politicized much more deeply. The most radical need is the need for universality, in the Marxist sense of the term. When people take to the streets to fight climate change, they think of a world united in a totality, not necessarily a world where they have all the rights and freedoms of the world. Gadgets and products they need, but a world where everyone and every species has the opportunity to thrive and flourish. I would say that's normal.

The question is how this basic instinctive communism, in the words of David Graeber (1961-2020), is frustrated, crushed and hijacked. How is this impeccably respectable need neglected and pathologized, so that people do not even dare to think about it, let alone express it? This kind of situation is created so that people adopt a kind of cynical posture.

I believe that the roses we need are those that come from our unity: I mentioned the Platonic terms “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” Let’s think about the culture and the work we can do together, let’s think about the search for truth in science and the work we do together. Our efforts to raise the moral standard, to try to end violence, rape, and racism, are intrinsic capacities that we all possess. Of course we are not up to the task, that we can live private lives in which we are selfish, hateful, and resentful. But that is not all. If that were the case, we might as well stop the transformative effort and resign.

*Richard Seymour is a journalist. He edits the blog leninology.co.uk and is co-editor of Salvage magazine. He is the author of, among other books, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (To). [https://amzn.to/3Pb7qQ8]

Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.

Originally published on the portal Without permission.

Translator's notes

[I] The text was constructed from the author's interview with Olly Haynes about his bookDisaster Nationalism, recently published by Verso, in which he uses psychoanalysis and Marxism to examine what is happening with the global far right.

[ii] The quarter-hour city is the model of a city where all essential services are within a quarter of an hour's walk or bike ride, a concept relaunched under this name in 2015 by Carlos Moreno, a Franco-Colombian urban planner.

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