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The Radical Right During Crisis. Группа авторов
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Radical right reductionism has played well to a populist audience looking for some kind of salvation from perceived problems and threats. The radical right has been skilful in weaving into its narrative an artful rhetoric and imagery concerning problems and threats that are in some cases real but mixed up with far more that are exaggerated or invented. Playing on populist fears, the radical right then proposes itself and its policies as their only salvation. This populist support, based on psychological dependence, may work for a time if the promise of salvation seems plausible and realistic. However, ultimately support is likely to wane as enacted radical right policies fail in the face of real-world complexity.
Dr Alan Waring is a Policy and Practitioner Fellow at CARR and adjunct professor at the Centre for Risk and Decision Sciences (CERIDES) at the European University Cyprus.
1 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “The History and Status of General Systems Theory,” Academy of Management Journal 15 no. 4 (1972): 407-26.
2 Peter Checkland, Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-year Retrospective (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1999).
3 Alan Waring, Practical Systems Thinking (Aldershot, UK: Thomson/Cengage, 1996), 62-4.
4 Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners (New York: Free Press, 1994); Henry Mintzberg, “Rethinking Strategic Planning, Part 1: Pitfalls and Fallacies,” Long Range Planning 27 no. 3 (1994): 12-21.
5 Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat, and Bert Spector, “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change,” Harvard Business Review 68 no. 6 (1990): 158-166.
6 “Andrew Sabisky, No 10 Adviser Resigns Over Alleged Race Comments,” BBC News, February 18, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51538493.
7 Alan Waring, “The Five Pillars of Occupational Safety and Health in a Climate of Authoritarian Socio-political Climates,” Safety Science 117 (2019): 152-63.
8 Alan Waring, “The Alt-Right, Environmental Issues, and Global Warming,” in The New Authoritarianism Vol 1: A Risk Analysis of the US Alt-Right Phenomenon, ed. A. Waring (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2018), 273-301.
9 Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made False or Misleading Statements Over Days,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/14/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/.
10 Nancy LeTourneau, “The Magnitude of Trump’s Lies,” The Washington Monthly, December 12, 2019, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/12/17/the-magnitude-of-trumps-lies/.
Alternative Epistemologies of the Radical Right: How Grand Narratives and the Quest for Truth Offer Recognition and a Sense of Belonging
Mario Peucker
In early 2019, during ethnographic fieldwork on radical right movements in Australia, I attended a far-right rally against allegedly “African gang crimes” in Melbourne. I spoke to a young man in his twenties about his reasons for taking part in the protest. In response he alluded that the problem was much bigger than the criminal behaviour of some African kids, but he was reluctant to explain his ominous insinuations: ‘I can’t tell you. You have to find out yourself. You just have to read the right things’. He appeared very proud of having found the “right” sources and discovered the truth independently and on his own accord. The truth needed to be earned, he seemed to believe, it can’t simply be passed on. There was a sense of superiority in his words as he had travelled this arduous path towards his “red pill” enlightenment, and he was now sending me on my own journey to discover this truth.
This experience stayed with me, but I was unable to make deeper sense of it until, almost one year later, I interviewed a group of people who had participated in anti-Islam protests and other far-right rallies for several years. During our conversation they also spoke at length about their long way of “educating themselves” and “doing their own research” gradually leading them to what they considered the truth. They were convinced that a secretive globalist cabal directly controls local council and governments to “break” society and implement the New World Order (NWO). Such NWO claims are among the most popular conspiratorial myths within radical right milieus in Australia and globally. In general, and also within this specific group, they serve as a grand narrative that ties a range of beliefs around mostly unrelated issue—from immigration, Islam and anti-Semitism (absent in my interviews) to socialism, climate change, gender identity, vaccination, and government actions—into a seemingly coherent system.
Leaving aside the sometimes obscure and contradictory nature of the arguments put forward by the people in this group, what became clear is that their personal quest for the truth was a process with complex psychological and social implications. Again, there was this strong sense of pride in their claimed capacity to look behind “fake news” in mainstream media and deliberate indoctrination attempts by the government and its education system. Although they all shared the same convictions around NWO, none of the interviewed individuals wanted to appear as if they had simply adopted the views of others (not even of those in their own group). Instead, they all insisted on having done their own independent “research”, and they simply arrived at the same truth from different angles, which was further proof that their convictions were true. They felt empowered and a sense of recognition and self-worth as a result of their personal quest, but these processes have also strengthened their collective identity and belonging to a community (in-group) with supposedly superior knowledge.
The vast literature on (radical) political and social movements1 and violent extremism2 has highlighted that such psychological and social factor are often pivot in explaining the appeal of far-right ideologies and groups. The analysis of these interviews underscores this and demonstrates the interplay between these factors and the specific ideological narratives. The people in this group have found recognition, respect, and social connectedness through their radical right activism and their pursuit of the truth.
There were also other social dynamics at play. Whilst emphasizing their individual autodidactic efforts, the interviewed individuals also stated that, once they have done their own research, they would come together and share with each other. This was described by one person as ‘ripple effect’, and another one stated:
As we learned more, we developed…and we all come back together, it’s about networking too. We all share. [Person X] may find out more information to do with Islam and Christians, [person Z] may find out something about Communism…we all learn from each other.
Through these processes of information sharing and mutual exchange of personal experiences, they “often find common ground”. This is how initially unrelated fears and concerns around issues such as Islam, vaccination, and marriage