Prospect The new fascism Local authorities and the police are facing a globally organised far right they barely understand By Paul Mason August 28, 2024

 Prospect 

The new fascism

Local authorities and the police are facing a globally organised far right they barely understand

By Paul Mason

August 28, 2024

“I think the protests are great,” the far-right influencer James Goddard told subscribers to his Telegram channel, in a video the day after the Sunderland riot. “But we need to clean up the optics... Number one, please stay away from religious buildings, places of worship, mosques, Islamic centres. Just stay away from them. You’re going to cause a conflict that we don’t need to have... yet.”

In his videos, Goddard—who now lives in Thailand, and was temporarily banned from X on 31st July for using racial slurs—specialises in menace, and as he pronounced the word “yet”, there was menace aplenty.

“I’m not inciting people to do anything,” he continued, before advising those who were taking part in “acts of civil disobedience” to leave their phones at home, to cover their faces and to avoid storing right-wing memorabilia where they live. “If I was there,” he said, “I would be targeting all of the government buildings and the buildings of the private companies who have made millions from the migrant invasion.”

After posting this video, Goddard circulated a hit list of 30 law firms and refugee advice centres to be targeted, but then deleted it, later telling his followers that the protests were probably organised by “the state”.

On 6th August, after Muslims in Birmingham staged a show of force to resist threats to their local mosque, Goddard delivered an apoplectic rant about eradicating the British Muslim community in its entirety: “When we win—and we will—their treachery won’t be forgotten, their violence won’t be forgotten. We will take their properties. We will take their money. We will jail them. And we will send them back to the dusty, third-world shitholes that they come from.”

Goddard is neither the most powerful nor the most profitable among the far-right “influencers” who stoked violent unrest across Britain after 30th July, the day following a stabbing attack in which three children were murdered. But his Telegram channel provides a case study in the information dynamics of modern fascism—that is, of fanatical racists and misogynists with an overt project to violently overthrow democracy.

Anti-immigration rioters clash with police © PA Images / Alamy Anti-immigration rioters clash with police © PA Images / Alamy

Much of Goddard’s content is reposted from other far-right channels, including those of American white supremacists and Russian ethnonationalists. It falls into three categories: racial slanders, reports of racist violence and triggers for outrage. Shortly after his diatribe against Muslims, for example, Goddard posted a video of a young blonde British woman saying she had been “done by five black guys in one night”.

You may not have heard of Goddard. But it is figures like him, rather than the formal leadership of hierarchical fascist groups, who have been pivotal in triggering the spread of the riots, says Joe Mulhall, the director of research at the anti-fascism NGO Hope not Hate.

“This is a vast, decentralised network of activists existing primarily online but sometimes breaking out into the offline world,” Mulhall tells me. “These individuals consume content, create content and sometimes act. And while it has no formal structure, the network has figureheads, super-sharers, weather-makers who direct the network, so that it operates like a school of fish.”

To follow the links from Goddard’s Telegram channel is to enter a parallel information universe. Here, a civil war predicted by Elon Musk on X has already begun. Here, every rape trial involves a Muslim perpetrator. Here, Birmingham is an “occupied city” and “Covid was ethnically targeted to spare Jews.”

On Goddard’s channel and across the British far-right infosphere, a recurrent theme is an alleged “two-tier policing”, in which any instance of leniency towards Muslim offenders, together with the tolerant policing style adopted towards the Gaza protests, is said to evidence systematic “wokeness” and prejudice against white Christians. As hundreds of rioters are sentenced, and as police move to coordinate with Muslim communities to defend their places of worship, this theme has become the far right’s signature tune.

We are no longer dealing with fascism as a Führer-led hierarchy, as it was in Nazi Germany, but as a rhizomic structure: the roots communicate with other roots independently of the tree trunk, and the modern equivalent of Mein Kampf is created by its readers in real time. It leaves the local institutions of democracy—police forces and councils—facing a globally organised force they barely understand.

Modern fascism is profoundly theoretical

“One of the hallmarks of post-organisational networks is that they’re fundamentally transnational,” says Mulhall. “So while the riots are hyperlocal and specific to communities, the networks driving them are global—and this heightens the sense of crisis. The rioters are not just angry about halal chicken nuggets being served in a school in Bradford. They’re angry about halal chicken nuggets at a school in Minneapolis or Budapest.”

The most important point for understanding where this goes next is that modern fascism is profoundly theoretical. In the late 1970s, the average National Front skinhead was someone who hated the smell of Asian food, respected the police, professed to be a British nationalist and wanted an end to primary immigration. The group’s members knew they had no prospect of electoral victory whatsoever, but they could terrorise immigrant communities and get their kicks in the process.

Today’s fascism is internationalist by design and overtly structured around a theory of victory. When Goddard peddles the fantasy of eradicating Muslims from the UK, and speaks of the moment “when we win”, he is playing on the central tenet of the Great Replacement theory.

Formulated in 2011 by the French writer Renaud Camus, the theory asserts that non-white immigration to Europe and the United States is not an accident but a design. It is a plan to replace white Christians by importing non-white communities with higher birth rates.

The aftermath of violent unrest in Rotherham this August. 

Previous page: police fending off rioters in the town. Image: © Milo Chandler / Alamy The aftermath of violent unrest in Rotherham this August. Previous page: police fending off rioters in the town. Image: © Milo Chandler / Alamy

One of the biggest mistakes we made in the 1990s was to assume that right-wing populism could act as a firewall against full-blown, violent and overt fascism—that however unpalatable its politics were, parties like Ukip and the predecessors to France’s National Rally were at least channelling racist anger into electoral, and therefore not violent, ends.

For about a decade, the firewall has been on fire. The ideologies of right-wing conservatism and populism have become magnetised towards the dogmas of fascism, with the “replacement” myth a central premise.

This framing massively raises the stakes. Fascists in the 1970s saw Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants as a threat to white people’s jobs and monoculture. For Camus—and for British activists who propagate his ideas—immigrants are reframed as colonists, occupiers or perpetrators of “white genocide”. This, in turn, legitimises fantasies of extreme violence against them, which can be propagated by social media users who may not even consider themselves part of the movement. A 41-year-old female care worker from Northampton published, and later deleted, a post on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care... If that makes me racist, so be it.”

The rest of this new fascist mindset follows logically from Camus’s premise: migrants are “occupiers”, and those collaborating with them are liberals, human rights lawyers and feminists. Lawyers protect the human rights of minority communities. Feminists not only -suppress the white birth rate but have overturned the natural order of things under which white alpha males get the prettiest girlfriends.

Behind the lawyers, the liberals and the feminists stand the ultimate enemy: the cultural Marxists who have plotted the takeover. This allegation is a straight lift from US paleoconservatism, which alleges that the Marxist left, having abandoned the proletariat, seeks—in league with a shadowy global Jewish elite—to undermine western society by promoting multiculturalism, reproductive rights, trans rights and homosexuality.

The genocidal implications of far-right influencers’ demands are obvious, and not surprising, to those who’ve studied the Nazis

For the theorists of modern fascism, the recipe for action at this stage is “preparation”: training oneself to fight; stockpiling weapons, food and terrorism manuals; and committing, where necessary, symbolic violence. Although some of this summer’s rioters have been hapless, hardcore activists understand that the most effective form of violence is gesture. The torching of refugee hotels resulting in no injuries is a warning of what will happen when the rioters can block the exits and the police are gone. The trashing of an Uber driver’s car is a message to all Uber drivers. The tactical violence of today is a practice run for the moment “when we win”, as Goddard puts it. 

And that fantasy of victory forms the capstone of the new fascist ideology. Its adherents dream of a “Day X”, when the rules-based international order ends with a global, ethnic civil war. Since the first weekend of August, when Belfast and a dozen English cities saw police struggle to control racist rioting, the global network of the far right has become fascinated with the prospect that it will begin here, with the violence in Britain. That is why it is so dangerous for Elon Musk to claim “civil war is inevitable” to his 193.8m followers on X.

Taken together, the Great Replacement theory, the prepping, the symbolic violence, Day X and a thread of violent misogyny (which is too broad for this article to explain fully) form a “social myth” in the sense used by the French philosopher Georges Sorel. In Reflections on Violence, published in 1906, Sorel argued that all revolutionary movements need to be structured around “anticipations of the future”. That is, a belief in something yet to come that, whether it happens or not, shapes all actions in the present, gains immense mobilising power and is irrefutable by reason.

Many aspects of this modern fascist mythology are adapted from 20th-century precedents. It is not lost on historians of fascism that “cultural Marxism” today plays the exact function that the concept of Judeo-Bolshevism did for the Nazis: it is a shadowy global force that is responsible for all the evils of the world.

Echoes of history: The National Front on the march in the 1980s Image: © Jim Rice / AvalonRed Echoes of history: The National Front on the march in the 1980s. Image: © Jim Rice / AvalonRed

Likewise, the genocidal implications of far-right influencers’ demands for the jailing, expropriation and deportation of Muslims and refugees are obvious, and not surprising, to those who’ve studied the Nazis. Odilo Globocnik, the commander of Operation Reinhard, the plan to exterminate Polish Jewry, only ever wrote of “sending the Jews across the Bug River.” He made no mention—either in his reports or orders—of actually killing the 1.7m Jews he murdered at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

What is new, however, is the elevation of violent misogyny to coequal status with racism; the determination to “prepare”, rather than simply march out of a bierkeller in a premature attempted putsch; and above all, the transnationalism. Modern fascists understand that, by attacking their own democratic and multi-ethnic societies together, they can speed the day when the global conflagration begins.

They have absorbed the principle outlined by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt: that true sovereignty lies with he who can suspend democracy. Hence, they can see the authoritarian Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi and the murderous Russian nationalism of Vladimir Putin as complementary to their task in the UK—especially when their shared disinformation machines attack their mutual enemies.

And of course, the internet, the great digital accelerator of individualism and chaos, creates an immersive life-world of prejudice and delusion. When its participants find each other in the flesh, this can drive them to participate in extreme behaviour that would not be predictable by observing their actions in the everyday world.

What we are facing, then, is not a remnant of something. This is not just a hangover from the days of racist comedians in working men’s clubs. It is a self-replicating far-right ideology and, as the historian Ernst Nolte wrote of Nazism, has “staggering logical coherence” for those who accept its twisted premise.

A key source of fascism’s strength in the 21st century is technological proficiency. The far right utilises cross-border digital networks to a far greater extent than do social democrats or the European left. Its technological infrastructure is currently superior to anything a democratic state might use to counter it. Amil Khan says his company, Valent Projects, which provides tools to detect online disinformation, has identified 12 networks currently amplifying far-right messaging in the UK. Together, they routinely reach six million people. And they have been constructed carefully over time.

“We can see those networks have promoted Russian positions at the start of the Ukraine war, then Reform during elections,” says Khan. “They also amplify a bunch of fringe ‘news’ sites, some of which are reported to be funded by US far-right figures.”

Every statement by the authorities is met with a tactical counter-narrative, tested and refined in real time. Take, for instance, Keir Starmer’s speech warning of a crackdown on rioters. Starmer was quickly portrayed as a traitor, determined to victimise white Britons. His words were montaged with footage of hooded Muslim youths marching through Birmingham.

Valent’s research shows that, whereas the unedited version of Starmer’s speech achieved 500,000 views via the social media accounts of mainstream broadcasters, the montaged, far-right versions were seen by millions. This content was then targeted algorithmically at low-income men over 50 living in English market and suburban towns.

The protean nature of the threat demands that both the state and civil society evolve new forms of self-defence. The most obvious moves are to coordinate public order policing nationally; to enact new riot policing tactics that minimise the danger to life and limb for ethnic minority communities; and to formalise security arrangements between the police and mosques, along the lines the Community Security Trust already operates for the Jewish community.

To tackle the online hate, incitement and disinformation, we need the full provisions of the Online Safety Act (2023), passed last year, to be activated immediately. Though the provisions are weaker than what we now need, if applied they would allow us to prosecute social networks which refuse to mitigate the risk of spreading violence and to press criminal charges against bosses who refuse to engage.

That the majority of Britons reject the new fascist ideology is without doubt. The scale and peaceful character of the anti-fascist mobilisations on 7th August, as well as the depth of media sympathy for them, demonstrate this, as does polling data indicating that just 7 per cent of Britons think the riots were justified. The organised far right mustered 30,000 people in Trafalgar Square on 27th July, so a rough estimate of their close periphery might be four times that figure.

Anti-racism protesters in Walthamstow, east London, 

respond to the far-right rioting that shocked the country. Image: © Aubrey Fagon / Alamy Anti-racism protesters in Walthamstow, east London, respond to the far-right rioting that shocked the country. Image: © Aubrey Fagon / Alamy

Now the rioting is hopefully suppressed, Britain needs an urgent effort to rebuild social cohesion. Emeka Forbes, a senior staffer at the Together Coalition, says, “We want to see civil society and government working closely together in the coming weeks and months to equip and empower local communities to build connection and trust, through moments of togetherness and efforts to bridge divides.”

The post-riot clean-ups, the viral spread of humour to pillory the most hapless rioters and the public embraces between people of different faiths show how such moments can begin. This is only the start of a long battle, however.  One glance at the social media content coming from the ex-industrial communities that saw the worst violence between 3rd and 5th August shows that the Sorelian myth of civil war has strengthened, not dissipated. And as dozens of rioters go through the courts, it is clear that there is no single profile of those who engaged in the violence.

The scale of the task ahead may be understood from the fact that, on 7th August, X unbanned James Goddard. He is, as I write, fulminating against Islam and the police, in his videos seen by tens of thousands of followers. And he is just one node in an ever-evolving network of hate.

Paul Mason is the author of How to Stop Fascism (Allen Lane) and associate fellow in Defence and Resilience at the Council on Geostrategy