Opposition to US wars unites circles that claim to be opposed to one another. A tribune published in Counterpunch proposes six resolutions regarding the United States and imperialist wars. The proposals are debatable, but what reveals not an anti-imperialist but an alter-imperialist alliance is the list of signatories. One finds there the most prominent figures in decolonial studies (Ramón Grosfoguel, Boaventura de Sousa Santos…), major names from the international far right (Alain de Benoist, Yvan Benedetti…), conspiracy theorists (David McDonald, Jean Bricmont…), antisemites (Norman Finkelstein, Dieudonné…)… What binds this tribune against the war in Iran is less a common political project — one grounded in the right of peoples to shape their own destiny — than shared excitement at the international political surge of the so-called “Global South,” with Russia at its head. Rather than an internationalist offensive, it is a reactionary advance that is taking shape through the reunification of forces drawing a teleological geopolitical vision of an apocalyptic war between a supposed “West” characterised as “civilised” or “decadent,” and a supposed “East” characterised as “barbaric” or “enlightened,” depending on the political camp mobilising it. The other element uniting this — not so improbable — constellation is antisemitism. Yvan Benedetti of the Œuvre Française, Christian Bouchet of the European Liberation Front, Dieudonné and his anti-Zionist party built with Alain Soral, to name only the most emblematic, do not seem so repellent to intellectuals who position themselves on the left — and it is their anti-Jewish obsession disguised as anti-imperialist criticism of Israel that provides this binding glue.
We have our own local foot-soldiers of this worldview, in part of the far right, as we saw in the Deranque affair and the neo-Nazi anti-Zionist galaxies surrounding the identitarian who was killed in a brawl he had provoked. Unfortunately, many were too busy with the (unworthy) LFI-bashing campaign to reflect on the problems created by conspiracist anti-Zionism on the one hand, and on the other too busy denouncing Zionism to understand what is really at stake — namely, the ideological bridges being built between the left and the far right. Far-right anti-imperialism, which is very often an alter-imperialism, is not new. Nor is the use of concepts from the left to create bridges of thought that serve the far right. In our Petit manuel de lutte contre l’antisémitisme we offer the following analysis.
After a period of imprisonment linked to his activities within the OAS, Dominique Venner published ‘Pour une critique positive’ (1962), a stocktaking of nationalist action since the war. This identitarian and revolutionary manifesto is a strategic proposal grounded in the conquest of cultural hegemony. It draws on the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to advocate “metapolitics.” According to sociologist Razmig Keucheyan, “metapolitics consists in mixing one’s ideas with those of the opposing camp, to the point of making them indistinguishable, and attributing them to ‘the people’.” [125] This strategy was developed within the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation (GRECE), alongside journalist and philosopher Alain de Benoist.
In order to rehabilitate the racialist theses that had elevated the Aryan as the superior man, activists of this new movement — who defined themselves as the “New Right” — transformed and adapted the racialist theories of the nineteenth century. They abandoned the pseudo-scientific arguments claiming to justify the existence of “races” through biology, replacing them with a defence of the right of peoples to preserve their cultural differences. They advocated geographical separation between peoples, whose cultures were considered hermetically sealed and irreconcilable. Eugenicist theses were thus updated in the name of the right to preserve the differences and specificities considered intrinsic to each people. The New Right defined itself as “differentialist anti-racist.” It did not explicitly claim a hierarchy between “races” — now rebranded as “peoples” — but advocated “remigration” so that peoples, conceived as homogeneous ethnic entities, could reproduce while preserving their cultural specificities.
The New Right proposed an adaptation of concepts and discourses that, while keeping antisemitism at the core of its thinking, erased the most overt formulations by using coded language capable of federating support around its worldview. In his ‘Manifesto for a European Renaissance’ (2012), de Benoist clarifies that the New Right “defends all ethnic groups, and all regional languages and cultures threatened with extinction” and supports “peoples who struggle against” Western colonisation. De Benoist criticises the effects of Western colonisation — “under the aegis of missionaries, armies and merchants, the Westernisation of the planet embodied an imperialist movement driven by the desire to erase all alterity” — and even calls for a “decolonisation of political consciousness.” If he condemns the destruction of indigenous peoples, it is above all miscegenation and globalisation that he criticises.
The manifesto of Génération Identitaire, a neo-fascist organisation, proclaims: “We refuse to become the Indians of Europe.” For the New Right, the aim is to resist immigration and the mixing of cultures, which would supposedly lead to cultural erosion. This right-wing decolonialism appears troubling at first sight. It is important to note that it developed after most decolonisations and independence movements, once the decolonisation process had been largely set in motion by the struggles of colonised populations themselves. The New Right’s decolonialism is therefore a readaptation of racial theories to the new reality born of anti-colonialist struggles, aimed at salvaging what can be saved of the racist and antisemitic ideology of European nationalisms and French imperialism. To understand it properly, one must see how the New Right deploys the writings of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist who was a committed member of the Nazi party between 1933 and 1936. Indeed, de Benoist, Aleksandr Dugin, and the other proponents of New Right ethno-differentialism draw a distinction between colonialism and imperialism. They oppose colonialism at a distance — occupying distant lands without settlers having any territorial roots there — to imperialism, meaning the expansion of a nation from a territorial anchor to create a civilisational bloc (Grossraum), “a ‘concrete’ conception inseparable from the particular people who inhabit it.” [126] “In the recent writings of Dugin and de Benoist, ‘colonisation’ is a contemptible deterritorialised practice, while ‘imperialism’ is reserved for a nobler form of territorial expansion.” The former is associated with “a rootless, parasitic, globalising financial capitalism (conceived as colonial)” and the latter with “a racial, national, industrial capitalism (conceived as sovereign, even decolonial).” This territorial conception of space, wrote Schmitt, “is incomprehensible to the Jewish mind.” [127]
One must appreciate the intensity of the theories propagated by Kevin MacDonald, who is only one deranged figure among the very numerous signatories of the tribune. We devoted several pages to his thinking in Petit manuel de lutte contre l’antisémitisme, in the chapter “LGBTQIA+ Conspiracy: Jews Against the Heterosexual Family.”
This vision of Jews as a dissolving element of society through the questioning of the patriarchal norm is far from belonging to the past. For Joni Alizah Cohen, a feminist researcher, the US far right sees the Jewish hand behind all contemporary social movements. She analyses the thinking of Kevin B. MacDonald, an antisemitic evolutionary psychologist whom the Anti-Defamation League describes as “the neo-Nazis’ favourite academic,” in “The Eradication of ‘Talmudic Abstractions’: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project.” According to Alizah Cohen, MacDonald “attributes immense social power to Jews, viewing Jews in general as covert agents lurking behind various movements such as Bolshevism, social democracy and, later, the anti-colonial struggle, gay and trans liberation, feminism and the Black Power movement — all intended to sabotage Western culture and societal norms.”
The conspiracist psychologist identifies the work of Adorno and the Frankfurt School on the authoritarian personality as an obstacle to the advent of fascism, on the grounds that a society in which gender norms are respected and the heterosexual family is sacrosanct is better positioned to favour the rise of national socialism. The Frankfurt School — the Institute for Social Research — brought together several Jewish figures who had fled Nazi Germany (Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin and others) and who elaborated critical theory. A multidisciplinary Marxist school of thought, it represents an anti-capitalism critical of Nazism. The study of the authoritarian personality, a concept drawn from political science and social psychology, sought to establish a social profile prone to orienting itself towards fascism. The US far right accuses Jews of “cultural Marxism,” a project supposedly carried out by Jews to destroy Western culture. In the lineage of this accusation, MacDonald deduces that Jews would have an objective interest in destabilising gender, sexual orientations, and the nuclear family, as well as in orchestrating “the transformation of society through social movements as a project motivated by their own ethnic security interests.” [248]
The other important actor in this reactionary offensive is the publishing house La Fabrique, which publishes the highly conservative Houria Bouteldja and Louisa Yousfi (read the critique by Faris Lounis here), but also Norman Finkelstein (read the critique by Omer Bartov here), and Andreas Malm — who did not sign the statement but fits perfectly within the same red-brown constellation (read the critique by Sylvaine Bulle here and that by Matthew Bolton here).
It should be recalled that Ramón Grosfoguel is the one who anointed Houria Bouteldja as the representative of decolonial studies in France (see for example here). This school of thought — which proposes the elaboration of centres of knowledge production and methods of knowledge production decentred from Europe and the United States, and whose primary postulate is intellectually highly stimulating and probably necessary — appears to have turned against the very peoples it claims to emancipate.
For further reading on the anti-imperialism of fools:
« Pourquoi l’extrême droite s’intéresse aux théories décoloniales », LVSL, https://lvsl.fr/pourquoi-lextreme-droite-sinteresse-aux-theories-decoloniales/
Collectif, Critique de la raison décoloniale, Sur une contre-révolution intellectuelle, L’échappée, 2024
Elgas, Les Bons ressentiments, Essai sur le malaise post-colonial, Rive Neuve, 2023
Delor et Pardo, Petit manuel de lutte contre l’antisémitisme, Editions du Commun, 2024
- [125] Razmig Keucheyan, Alain de Benoist, du néofascisme à l’extrême droite « respectable », Revue du Crieur, 2017, n° 6, p. 128-143
- [126] Miri Davidson, « Sea and Earth », New Left Review, 04/04/2024, [en ligne] consulté le 15/5/2024 et traduit dans Alexandra Knez, « Pourquoi l’extrême droite s’intéresse aux théories décoloniales », LVSL, [en ligne] consulté le 15/5/2024
- [127] Ibid.
- [247] Joni Alizah Cohen, « The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project », site de la maison d’édition Versobooks, 19/12/2018, [en ligne] consulté le 12/4/2024. Traduit de l’anglais par Sophie Coudray, « L’éradication des “abstractions talmudiques” : l’antisémitisme, la transmisogynie et le projet nazi », Contretemps, 05/06/2029, [en ligne] consulté le 19/12/2024.
- [248] Ibid.
Jonas Pardo is an educator, researcher and author based in France. He designs and leads training courses on combating antisemitism.
The French original of this article was originally published in Mediapart. This English translation, by Daniel Mang, was first published on the Left Renewal Blog.
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