Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry

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Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic RivalryTamir Bar-On a

a Department of Humanities and International Relations, Mexico

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To cite this Article Bar-On, Tamir(2009) 'Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry', TotalitarianMovements and Political Religions, 10: 3, 241 — 264To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14690760903396351URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14690760903396351

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Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,Vol. 10, Nos. 3–4, 241–264, September–December 2009

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Understanding Political Conversion andMimetic Rivalry

TAMIR BAR-ON*

Department of Humanities and International Relations, Campus Querétaro, Tecnológico de Monterray, MexicoTaylor and FrancisFTMP_A_439813.sgm10.1080/14690760903396351Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions1469-0764 (print)/1743-9647 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & [email protected]; [email protected]

ABSTRACT In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the French nouvelle droite under its doyenAlain de Benoist claimed that it had made a political ‘conversion’ from the revolutionaryRight (or conservative revolutionary) milieu to ‘democracy’ and that it had created a‘post-fascist’ political synthesis. The paper under consideration will argue that thenouvelle droite’s political ‘conversion’ process was only exoteric in nature by mimickingthe ideas of the New Left and that its esoteric orientation was of ‘true believers’ who neverleft a political pantheon of conservative revolutionary ideas with roots largely in the 1920sand 1930s. Using the model of the nouvelle droite, as well as the ideas of René Girard andEmilio Gentile in respect of mimetic rivalry between Right and Left and ‘political religion’respectively, I examine other intellectual political conversions of the twentieth centuryfrom Benito Mussolini to Christopher Hitchens. Using these aforementioned examples, Itrace a model of political conversion for the twentieth century and new millennium, withparticular emphasis on conversionary prerequisites and processes, as well as the mimeticsymbiosis and rivalry between Right and Left. I conclude that even in a secular age ourpolitical conversions involve both mimicry and syncretism vis-à-vis traditional religiousconversion experiences, but they are generally short-lived due to crises, collapse,generational change or ideological attrition.

Introduction

French philosopher René Girard (b. 1923) argues that a great revelation in humanhistory begins in the Old Testament with the story of Job and finds its apotheosisin the Passion story of Jesus Christ in The New Testament.1 Girard insists on ananti-sacrificial reading of the Gospels that focuses on the victims of violence, thusundermining the mainstream, sacrificial understanding of Christianity promotingthe ‘contagion’ of mimetic violence.2 One can certainly see how Girard’s interpre-tation might lead to a flawed belief that Christianity is superior among all faithsbecause of its explicit focus on the victims of violence. Nonetheless, the Frenchthinker claims to offer us a way out of post-9/11 mimetic violence on a ‘planetaryscale’;3 a mimetic violence that, as Quakers point out, first begins in our heartsand spreads like a virus to the heart of the body politic.4 Yet, Girard’s deeper

*Email: [email protected]

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242 T. Bar-On

insights are about how both Right and Left, as well as state and non-state actors,minimise their violence in the name of their respective political projects. Girardrefused to take the position of the legitimisation of political violence. He sought tounravel a truth, something hidden since the inception of human societies, namely,the ritualised and real violence against a scapegoat that simultaneously createdsocial order and threatened to undermine it.5 He also examines the way violencespreads in a systematic manner and how difficult it is to escape the mimetic cycleof violence once it begins.6

Another European thinker, the Italian historian Emilio Gentile (b. 1946), alsoseeks to explain political violence and mimicry through the notion of the ‘sacral-ization of politics’.7 For Gentile, the ‘religion of politics’ is a particular form of‘sacralization of politics’ that takes place in the modern period after the politicaldomain gains its independence from traditional religion.8 Politics takes on asacred aura with the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century (i.e. theAmerican Revolution of 1776 and French Revolution of 1789), but its roots stretchback to the humanistic idealisation of Greek and Roman civic religion; new secu-lar concepts of life, society, and the state; the Masonic tradition of rituals andsymbols; and the rational bent of Enlightenment culture.9 For the emergence ofthe ‘sacralization of politics’, the prerequisites include: secularisation, modernisa-tion, the independence of politics from established religions, and the separation ofchurch and state.10 ‘Sacralization of politics’ is also an affirmation of theprinciple of state sovereignty vis-à-vis the church and ‘the glorification of thenation as the supreme ideal entity to which the citizen owes loyalty, devotion,and commitment’.11

Gentile is adamant that the ‘sacralization of politics’ persists in the newmillennium, but has taken its most obvious forms in the liberal republican statesformed in the United States and France in the late eighteenth century, the BolshevikSoviet Union, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Maoist China. Gentile calls the firsttwo democratic experiments ‘civil religions’ and the latter totalitarian systems‘political religions’.12 Whereas the former ‘civil religions’ coexist with other ideol-ogies and respect individual freedoms, the latter ‘political religions’ are constructedaround a monopoly of power, ideological monism and the total subordination ofthe individual and collectivity to its sacred commandments.13

Yet, the ‘sacralization of politics’ has a deeper meaning. It is created each time apolitical entity, whether nation, state, race, class, party or movement, is trans-formed into a ‘sacred entity’: transcendent, unchallengeable and intangible.14

New national states that emerged after the collapse of European colonial empiresin Asia and Africa from the 1950s to 1970s exhibited the ‘sacralization of politics’as the main vehicle for legitimising new political institutions and forging anational identity out of diverse ethnic, linguistic and religious communities.15 The‘sacralization of politics’ can lead to extreme devotion in which individuals arewilling to sacrifice their lives on behalf of the cause, its often deified leader andthe community. Gentile insists that the ‘religion of politics’ is a religion preciselybecause it is ‘a system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that interpret anddefine the meaning and end of human existence by subordinating the destiny ofindividuals and collectivity to a supreme entity’.16 Modern man (woman) tried tobanish religion from the world, but instead engaged in mimicry and syncretismsince a civil or political religion adopts or incorporates traditional religion’smethod of developing and representing a system of beliefs and myths, definingdogma, and even structuring liturgy.17


Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry 243

Let me reiterate that the ‘sacralization of politics’ means the merging of thereligious and political dimensions and it is unique to modern society and masspolitics. Yet, as Gentile argues, this phenomenon of the ‘sacralization of politics’ israther distinct from modern manifestations of the ‘politicization of religion’ suchas Islamic fundamentalist movements that take power in order to implement theirspecific religious beliefs in society and the state.18 A key question Gentile asks iswhether civil religions represented by the old democracies are in decline,19 butthe spectre of political Islamism, 9/11, US and western militarism at home andabroad, and the rising tide of extreme right-wing political parties in westernEurope since the mid-1990s have re-kindled possibilities for the ‘sacralization ofpolitics’ in Euro-American societies.

Towards a Model of Political Conversion

I have broadly outlined both Girardian and Gentilean frameworks in respect ofmimetic rivalry and ‘political religion’. My goal in this paper is to use both Euro-pean thinkers to develop a new paradigm for understanding political ‘conver-sion’ and mimetic rivalry between left- and right-wing political camps. In the late1980s and early 1990s, the French nouvelle droite or European New Right (ENR)under its doyen Alain de Benoist claimed that it had made a political ‘conversion’from the revolutionary Right (or conservative revolutionary) milieu to ‘democ-racy’ and that it had created a ‘post-fascist’ political synthesis. The paper underconsideration will argue that the nouvelle droite’s political ‘conversion’ processwas only exoteric in nature by mimicking the ideas of the New Left and that itsesoteric orientation was of ‘true believers’20 who never left a political pantheon ofconservative revolutionary ideas with roots largely in the 1920s and 1930s. ForEric Hoffer, the major differences among men and women is not in their doctrinalpattern of beliefs, but their absolutist ‘temper of mind’.21 ‘The true believer is thebeliever in total solutions’, writes Sidney Hook in the introduction to Hoffer’s TheTrue Believer.22 Hoffer’s insights are applicable to the French nouvelle droite leader:a true believer in his attempt to preserve the legacy of the inter-war anti-liberal,anti-egalitarian conservative revolutionary milieu into the new millennium.

Using the model of the nouvelle droite, as well as the ideas of René Girard andEmilio Gentile in respect of mimetic rivalry between Right and Left and the‘sacralization of politics’, respectively, I will examine other intellectual politicalconversions of the twentieth century from Benito Mussolini to ChristopherHitchens. My study of political conversion extends to the new millennium andincludes four case studies: (1) contemporary intellectuals that begin on the farright or far left of the political spectrum and then claim to ‘convert’ to theopposite political side (e.g. Alain de Benoist, Arthur Koestler and ChristopherHitchens); (2) contemporary politicians who have claimed to supersede the neo-fascist milieu (e.g. Gianfranco Fini and Gianni Alemanno of the NationalAlliance–Alleanza Nazionale, AN, in Italy); (3) leaders of terrorist groups thatrenounced extreme nationalism and the armed struggle (e.g. Kurdistan Workers’Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan); and (4) historical case studies of the birth ofpolitical ideologies such as fascism and the ‘non-conformist’ school of the 1930sand 1940s (e.g. Benito Mussolini and Alexandre Marc).23 Using these aforemen-tioned examples, I will attempt to trace a model of political conversion for thetwentieth century, with particular emphasis on the mimetic symbiosis and rivalrybetween Right and Left.


244 T. Bar-On

The premise of this article is that ideological/political ‘conversion’ is at leastpartly a quasi-religious experience based on mimicry and syncretism inheritedfrom dominant traditional religions. Mimicry here implies the conscious orunconscious adopting of traditional religion’s method of developing and repre-senting a total system of beliefs and myths, defining dogma and ethics, and struc-turing liturgy.24 Syncretism connotes the incorporation of traditions, myths andrituals inherited from traditional religions, but in a manner that transforms andadapts them according to the needs of its own ‘mythical and symbolic universe’.25

It should be stressed that ‘religions of politics’ of the modern era are in the major-ity of historical cases short-lived. As Gentile posits, a civil or political religion‘enjoys a period of vitality of variable strength, and then its capacity to inspirefaith and enthusiasm starts to expend itself because of the attrition of time, thepassing of circumstances that gave rise to it, generational change, or crisis andcollapse in the political movement from which it was created’.26

My understanding of political ideologies is that they entail a coherent,comprehensive set of normative beliefs and worldviews focusing on the prob-lems of human nature, the process of history and socio-political arrangements.27

In order to better understand left-wing and right-wing political ideologues,movements and parties, I use Norberto Bobbio’s ‘ideal type’, heuristic distinc-tion between Left and Right with the former committed to equality and thelatter wedded to inequality.28 Equality has four connotations: administrativelyor legally imposed equality; liberal equality of opportunity; the socialist notionof equality of condition; and the biological, spiritual and moral equality ofhuman beings. As Bobbio’s distinction is an ‘ideal type’, it is clear that not allright-wing parties or movements will reject administratively or legallymandated equality (e.g. mainstream conservative parties in western Europe orNorth America), while not all left-wing parties or movements can practicablyachieve the socialist ideal of equality of condition for all its citizens (e.g. Maoistand Stalinist state communist dictatorships that mocked popular, egalitarianimpulses).

It is no accident that the nouvelle droite leader in France, Alain de Benoist, arguesin line with Bobbio’s distinction that his fundamental quarrel is with egalitarian-ism, which he argues in a Nietzschean vein produced the mass ‘slave’ ideologiesof the Judeo-Christian tradition and its secular derivatives, namely, liberalism,social democracy, socialism, communism and Marxism.29 Egalitarianism, insistsde Benoist, is to be rejected because it leads to the loss of cultural differences, ‘thereduction of all cultures to a world civilization’, a pseudo-multiculturalism andthe destruction of Europe’s hierarchical, plural, rooted and pagan past.30

My argument is that successful political ‘conversion’ in the context of a ‘sacral-ization of politics’ is a complex process that requires 10 prerequisites: (1) a seriesof major crises and collapse (i.e. political-institutional, socio-economic, ideologi-cal, cultural, spiritual, generational or external invasion); (2) a crisis of faith in theprevailing hegemonic ideology (i.e. the ability to inspire faith and enthusiasmwanes due to time, the emergence of new circumstances without the past’srevolutionary fervour and generational change); (3) the ideologue’s ‘conversion’to the new faith (with strains of the old ideology perhaps lingering in the newideological framework); (4) political space for the new ideology; (5) dynamicproponents of the ideology able to attract a mass or key elite following; (6) acultural-civilisational milieu that promotes the new ideas like a ‘mimeticcontagion’; (7) the willpower of devoted ‘true believers’ against great odds; (8)



organisational cohesion driving the ideology to new heights of success; (9) thecollusion or semi-collusion of established authorities; and (10) a dose of whatNiccolò Machiavelli called fortuna.31

I utilise Antonio Gramsci to help us understand cultural–civilisational seachanges that allow political space for new ideological syntheses.32 That is, I havestressed the role of intellectuals in the paper in a Gramscian mould. Intellectualideas play a key role in shaping history and moulding consensus among thepeople in civil society in favour of or against a reigning ideological framework.While I reject the nouvelle droite’s elitist, hierarchical, homogeneous notion ofregional or national identity, its leader clearly understood the central importanceof dominant ideas in shaping and moving history by imitating the language of hisleftist opponents:

Without a precise theory, there is no effective action … All the revolu-tions of history have only transposed into facts an evolution that hadalready occurred in the spirit. One can’t have a Lenin before having hadMarx. … The French right is Leninist without having read Lenin. It hasn’trealized the importance of Gramsci. It hasn’t realized that cultural powerthreatens the apparatus of the state.33

The task of understanding political conversions is daunting, yet I want to bettergrasp why political conversions occur, whether on the Left, Right or beyond. Isconversion of a political nature similar to physiologically induced, religiousconversion experiences?34 Are political conversion experiences secularisedversions of deep, religious conversion experiences? In a neo-liberal age, do wenot require substitute conversion experiences of a political dimension? Werefascism and communism not mirrors as substitute religions?35 Is conversion amatter of realpolitik or an authentic ‘conversion’ to a new ‘faith’? It is hoped thatmy model of political conversion does not merely apply to the cited examples,but can be tested in respect of ideologues and political movements around theworld. So, for example, how do we explain the ‘conversion’ of certain Arabintellectuals from secular nationalism or pan-Arabism to Islamism, or TarikRamadan’s ‘secular Islamism’ in western Europe?36 Or, how about the ‘conver-sion’ of some ecological thinkers and movements to the neo-liberal marketideology?37

In addition, I would insist that anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal esoteric beliefs arenot equivalent to exoteric conversions to ‘democracy’, as in the case of Alain deBenoist.38 More to the point, two different messages can be simultaneously sent tothe larger public and select, elite ‘converts’ that are guardians of a more primor-dial, esoteric doctrine. Furthermore, in ideologically diverse journals, de Benoistnever tires of pointing out that the shifting sands of the political landscape mightdictate if he converts towards the Right or Left.39 This calculation will presumablybe based on whether extreme radicals of the Right or Left can better assist in thedestruction of liberal democracy.

Moreover, there is a continuum of different types of political conversionprocesses: authentic or inauthentic (i.e. idealistic or opportunistic), esoteric orexoteric, durable or flexible (the more profound the conversion experience, themore durable the conversion), survival or ‘autonomous’ conversions (e.g. life-and-death vs ‘free will’ conversions), and conversionary vs non-conversionaryimitation.40


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Cases Studies and Types of Political Conversion Processes

Let me now apply our case studies to the aforementioned types of politicalconversionary processes. The case studies in question include politicians andintellectuals as diverse as Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Alexandre Marc,Gianni Alemanno, Abdullah Ocalan and Christopher Hitchens.

Hitler’s conversion to biological racism and Nazism was authentic in that it wasarguably the guiding framework of his ideology.41 His obsessive biological anti-Semitism was idealistic and messianic in its fervour. Hitler’s moment of opportu-nity particularly increased after the second financial crisis in 1929 and it was atthis point that Germany was ready to accept him as a national saviour, a prophetafigure and the embodiment of Nazism as a revitalisation movement of mass hope.42

A series of deep-seated crises set the stage for Hitler’s rise: the political climaterevolving around the stalemate of Weimar Germany’s unstable, discreditedliberal parliamentary framework and the rise of a revolutionary communist Left(although Mann argues it was waning in its ability to seize power and collectiviseproperty by the early 1930s when the Nazis seized power),43 and collusion ofestablished state authorities in the wake of prolonged extra-parliamentaryviolence of radical sectors of the Right and Left. In addition, World War I and thede-militarisation of Germany in the wake of the Versailles Treaty induced a mili-tary crisis. The cultural–civilisational milieu increasingly argued that Europe wasa dying civilisation that needed radical rebirth to rescue it from an age of ‘materi-alist decadence’. The political, military, cultural, socio-economic and ideologicalcrises induced the flowering of organic ultra-nationalism (including Germany’sspecial historical mission), new statist models for popular mobilisation born inthe wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and World War One and a desire tosupersede existing liberal, conservative, or socialist solutions.44

Hitler’s appeal had both esoteric and exoteric dimensions. Mein Kampf andthe National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbe-itspartei, NSDAP) worldview were impregnated with biological anti-Semitismand the desire for racially cleansed ‘living space’ for Aryans in the East. Peaceovertures were simultaneously made to the international community, whileGermans were promised a national socialism that would defeat the communistenemy and restore security and internal peace to Germany. Hitler’s ultra-nation-alist, populist and anti-Semitic positions were durable in that he held them untilhis suicide in 1945. His conversion to biological racism as the framework forrestoring German national grandeur was ‘autonomous’, as was the conversion ofmillions of Germans to the Nazi mission.

High-ranking officials in the NSDAP like Albert Speer recall the period inmystical, magnetic and messianic terms akin to deep religious experiencesinduced by Hitler. Hitler was viewed as the new charismatic prophet sent byprovidence to guide the nation in a period of ‘decadence’ and prolonged crisestowards a new, revolutionary historical beginning that embodied an alternativemodernism beyond liberal and communist solutions.45 Like participants in theFrench Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Fascist March on Rome in1922, Germans in the Nazi period must have felt that they lived at the threshold ofanother age and time beyond linear time; a new beginning without historicalprecedent that was both terrifying and exhilarating because it promised a radicalbreak with the old systems and mass redemption in times of profound, multiplecrises. Without a doubt, the repressive arm of the state brutally enforced the new



conversions to Nazism, but these conversions had a degree of authenticity inlarge segments of the German population who felt that they were living at thethreshold of a new time. Girard would insist that conversion to Nazism was aform of non-conversionary imitation because it turned away from Christ, but thatis because he narrowly views the Christian message as historically uniquebecause Christ rejected violence and Christianity made it its mission to side withthe victims of violence (while institutionalised Christianity, the Inquisition andcolonialism made a mockery of this claim).

If we turn to de Benoist, his conversion to ‘democracy’ is circumscribed, as itmust be direct democracy in the ancient Athenian or Icelandic mould.46 It issomewhat inauthentic in that it bypasses his vehement rejection of liberal andsocialist variants of democracy.47 He insists on a culturally homogeneous notion ofdirect democracy without mediators as the only true democracy because it isbased on a collectivist framework and a ‘relatively homogeneous people consciousof what makes them a people’.48 De Benoist is certainly opportunistic in that heseeks to supersede his revolutionary right-wing origins in support of FrenchAlgeria by playing the ‘democratic’, anti-fascist card. His esoteric anti-egalitarian-ism remains, as does his attachment to conservative revolutionary authors ofthe inter-war years that radically rejected egalitarianism and liberal democracy.

Benito Mussolini’s ‘conversion’ to fascism is still the most stunning conversionof the twentieth century. Mussolini had been the leading light of Italian socialismfrom 1902 to 1914, the editor of the socialist paper Avanti!, and one of the mostrespected European revolutionaries of the Left. He converted to pro-war leftismin 1914 by insisting that Italy was a ‘proletarian nation’ and later became fascism’sleading proponent throughout the European continent. Charges of a handsomemonetary pay-off plagued Mussolini, particularly among his old leftist comrades.Nolte notes that Mussolini’s conversion period involved a grave crisis of faith forrevolutionary coherence; it was gradual and never resolved fully until after theMarch on Rome in 1922; and it was arguably the most spiritually and physicallyexhausting period in his life as great shouts of betrayal rocked the Italian politicallandscape.49

Despite his Marxist roots, it was Mussolini who was at first the model forfascists and authoritarians throughout Europe. His conversion was authenticbecause it founded a new, radical, secular ideological framework that combinedmilitant socialism with ultra-nationalism. Other fascists beyond Italy oftenimitated Mussolini, until Hitler’s dramatic rise to power under the Nazi Partybanner in 1933.50 After 1933, it would be the Nazi rather than Italian Fascist modelthat was more often imitated abroad because it was more revolutionary, violentand ‘healthy’ in its struggle against the ‘materialist menaces’ of the BolshevikSoviet Union and the liberal capitalist United States and Great Britain. Despitefascism’s ideal that it was national and not necessarily for export, in a perfectdisplay of mimetic rivalry both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany would be modelsfor a ‘universal fascism’ movement that, as early as 1925 in Italy and at its heightfrom 1933 to 1936, sought to challenge international communism and rejuvenatethe 1919 martial, revolutionary spirit of what Renzo de Felice calls ‘movementfascism’.51

In this century, the nouvelle droite’s leading intellectual Alain de Benoist hasclaimed to renounce the ultra-nationalist, pro-colonialist and conservative revolu-tionary milieux of the 1960s. He made his ‘opening to the Left’ in the 1980s bythreatening to vote for the French Communists in the 1984 European elections. De


248 T. Bar-On

Benoist embraced a ‘new Right’ that claims to be neither fascist, nor liberal, andeven anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, ‘democratic’, ecological and NewLeft in inspiration.52 In an age of increasing neo-liberal globalisation, de Benoisthas even been so audacious as to question the central plank of the Right, namely,its commitment to the nation-state, by calling for an ‘anti-nationalist’, regionallybased ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’.53

The victory of Gianni Alemanno as the new ‘post-fascist’ mayor of Rome inApril 2008 is another example of an alleged political conversion from the neo-fascist Right to conservative new Right. One of the leading Canadian dailies makesno mention of Alemanno’s attachment to the allegedly ‘post-fascist’ AN or itspredecessor, the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano,MSI).54 To add to the confusion, the Sunday Times has called Alemanno a ‘formerneo-fascist’, while the Telegraph dubbed him a ‘firebrand neo-fascist’.55 Alemannoowes his electoral victory to a rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe associ-ated with uncertainty about globalisation, modernity and the European Union(EU) project, the demonisation of Roma in the Italian capital (linked with brutalcriminality by Alemanno’s electoral campaign), and his call for the expulsion of 20000 illegal immigrants from the ‘eternal city’.56 Unfortunately, the former centre-left Roman mayor Walter Veltroni participated in the anti-immigrant wave bythreatening expulsions.

What is clear in the Alemanno case is that he has been aided by the intellectualacumen of the Italian New Right with its ties to the French nouvelle droite, the‘post-fascist’ AN, and the radicalisation of the entire political class on immigra-tion issues.57 If Alemanno has become more acceptable to the conservative Right,it is because the conservative Right has slowly become more vociferously anti-immigrant as displayed by the participation of the anti-immigrant AN andNorthern League (Lega Nord), LN in national coalition governments in 1994 andtwice in the new millennium. It was Gianfranco Fini, the AN leader, who becameItaly’s deputy prime minister in 2003. Fascist-era songs and cries of ‘Duce’ greetedAlemanno’s victory in Rome’s city centre on 28 April 2008, the first time the Righthad won the capital since the Fascist era.

I would argue that Alemanno’s ‘conversion’ out of the world of the revolution-ary Right or neo-fascism is merely exoteric rather than esoteric, to borrow thedistinction of one fascism scholar.58 Alemanno understands that one cannot be anovert fascist after the race laws and Auschwitz, while fascism for him is also ametapolitical project that seeks to alter the mentalities of existing elites to turnthem away from the dominant egalitarian-based, multicultural and liberal frame-work.59 It was the French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche (1907–1998), one of thelast postwar fascists to openly use the fascist label, who in 1961 claimed thatfascism would return one day ‘with another name, another face’ and few of thetraits of its past: the charismatic leadership principle, party army, valorisation ofviolence, paramilitary street violence or the aim of totalitarianism.60 If fascism orextreme right-wing politics is making its comeback, it is because of its rejection ofthe violent, jackboot ultra-nationalism of the past and its greater discretionarypowers as exemplified by the discourse changes of the nouvelle droite. Legal,metapolitical and parliamentary means are mere tactical frameworks used byAlemanno that temporarily lead him to endorse liberal democracy. In Gramscianterms, Alemanno plays a ‘war of position’ that seeks to slowly convert key elitesand shape a new, hegemonic mass consensus towards their anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian, anti-multicultural theses.



In order to better understand Alemanno, we need to grasp the history of fascistand ‘non-conformist’ intellectuals in the inter-war years. Academics like Ze’evSternhell have demonstrated how left-wing, anti-Marxist socialist dissidents, inconjunction with ultra-nationalists, already created the fascist synthesis betweenthe 1880s and the eve of World War I in France.61 Gregor shows how syndicalist,corporatist and anarchist thinkers of the Left such as Corradini and Pannunziobecame major fascist theoreticians by combining their original left-wing concernsin a multiclass, regulated, nationalist developmental dictatorship in contrast toleft-wing Marxist internationalism.62 Were there not other non-conformist think-ers like Sorel or Mounier in France that drifted indiscriminately between Left andRight, united by a vehement, revolutionary, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist anti-materialism? Non-conformists of various stripes plagued the French politicallandscape in the 1930s and 1940s from Déat and Doriot to Valois and Marc.

Doriot was an ardent, high-ranking communist before he founded his ownpopular, corporatist fascist party, the Parti Populaire Français (PPF) and eventurned towards Vichy ultra-collaboration by organising French fascist volunteerson the Eastern front to fight with the Nazis.63 Valois started one of the first fascistparties in Europe, Le Faisceau, and turned to anarchism by 1928 and finally resis-tance against Nazism (culminating with his death at Bergen-Belsen).64 Marc wasliterally a convert – a Russian Jewish émigré to France who converted to a synthe-sising blend of Nietzschean Catholicism and longed for the return of an elitist,spiritual, hierarchical, federal, personalist Europe along medieval Catholic lines.65

These ‘non-conformist’ forces certainly created a congenial intellectual climatethat allowed the authoritarian, collaborationist Vichy regime to emerge; somegave their full-fledged support to fascist parties; and all undermined the egalitar-ian impulses of 1789 that were completely jettisoned even before 1940 with theNazi invasion of France.66 There is every reason to suggest that Marc and theother non-conformists were authentic, zealous converts to a ‘third way’ that wasrevolutionary, authoritarian and pan-European.

How about political conversions in our century? Are all ideologies irrelevantsave liberalism (or neo-liberalism), as Francis Fukuyama boldly asserted in1989?67 What happens in an age of catastrophe? Do ideologies any longer haveany meaning in the age of nuclear weapons, lethal suicide terrorism, environmen-tal destruction and the arrival of what the neo-Marxist Kojève following Hegeltermed the ‘universal homogeneous state’?68 Why have neo-fascist and extremeright-wing political parties succeeded even as their mimetic, communist rivalsplunge to all-time lows?69 Do we not have the end of traditional conservatismwith the rise of the pro-capitalist Anglo-American New Right, which is in fact aradical form of political thought based on the universal spread of capitalistmarkets? Has the entire planet ‘converted’ to ‘market fundamentalism’,70 to useNaomi Klein’s phrase, with the egalitarian Left everywhere a pale shadow ofitself? Why do ecological parties even convert to the market ideology? Is Europeexhausted and will the political models of the future be supplied by SouthAmerica, Asia, or the Middle East?71

A man that sits in a Turkish prison since his capture by the Turkish state in 1999might help us understand the fate of political ideologies and conversions in thetwenty-first century. While denouncing the excesses of the armed struggle and the‘nationalist poison’ that he swallowed,72 the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan retainsa Marxist, Gramscian and Hegelian view of history in which ‘democratic civilisa-tion’ (i.e. Ocalan cites the rule of law, separation of church and state, popular


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political participation, the equality of sexes and respect for minority rights) is thehighest stage of human historical development and we merely wait for a newsynthesis to emerge outside the West.73 Ocalan’s ‘conversion’ to ‘democratic civil-isation’ is authentic in that it comes from a series of crises, including the demise ofMarxism–Leninism as an animating ideology after 1989, his ignominious captureand the political intransigence of both the PKK and Turkish state in a guerrilla warthat left 30 000 dead since 1984. Ocalan is viewed by most Turks as a blood-thirsty‘terrorist’. For many Turks, his new ‘war of position’ is disingenuous and tacticalin that it is designed to make autonomy gains for Kurds in a way that armedconflict made impossible.

Finally, as Christopher Hitchens made the tortuous conversion journey fromthe Trotskyite Left to liberal democracy and even support for the US invasion ofSaddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, he claimed to uphold one principle throughouthis life: the defence of secularism.74 In short, Hitchens insists that his ‘conversion’is authentic, while his leftist comrades of the old anti-colonial Left today side withanti-progressive ‘Islamo-fascists’. The problem, in the Hitchens case, was that,despite its brutal human rights abuses, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq was one of themost secular regimes in the Arab world.

All the political conversion cases under consideration, from Hitchens toOcalan and Alemanno to Mussolini, have varying degrees of authenticity anddurability. In addition, the thinkers and politicians studied all embody Gentile’s‘sacralization of politics’. They are united by a ‘religion of politics’, or a system-atic framework of beliefs, myths, rituals and symbols that interpret and definethe meaning and goal of human existence. They all seek to subordinate thedestiny of individuals and the collectivity to a supreme, mythical entity, whetherthe state, nation, region, class, race or supreme leader. Finally, a political conver-sion is complicated by tactical considerations for ideologies that are today lessacceptable to the culture at large such as fascism, or even elements of theextreme Right. A de Benoist or Alemanno must increasingly play by the liberalrules of the game and their acceptance of ‘democracy’ is merely exoteric ratherthan esoteric.

Four Case Studies of Political Conversions

I have already sought to argue that political conversion is a complex processinvolving numerous variables. It is also my hypothesis that many of the conver-sion experiences in the political realm mirror and mimic religious experiences andthus embody a secularised search for meaning. Yet, Roger Eatwell argues for adistinction between political, secular transcendence in the here and now as repre-sented by liberalism, socialism, or fascism and religious transcendence in whichtranscendence is primarily in the world to come.75 There were certainly more blurrycases, as in the Romanian Iron Guard in which organic ultra-nationalism andChristian Orthodoxy combined to create a mystical, religious Weltanschauung thatembodied a clerico-fascism of complete religious and political transcendence.Having said that, political conversion among fascists, non-conformists, or thenouvelle droite sought to convert its elites into totally ‘new men’ that were seen asthe embodiments of the national or regional destiny of a homogeneous people.These ‘new men’ were the elite vanguard in a secular age, which nonethelessembodied a political idea with an absolute religious fervour. In Gentile’s terms,they all sought to create and perfect ‘political religions’.



At this juncture in the paper, I want to more comprehensively examine fourtypes of political conversions: Intellectuals exiting the far Right or far Leftmilieux, neo-fascist politicians converting to ‘post-fascism’, dissident socialiststurning to fascism or non-conformism, and nationalist or Marxist terrorists turn-ing towards non-violence and democracy. For each type of political conversion, Iwill examine the mimetic rivalry between Left and Right, as well as selectedfactors that allowed for the political conversion in question to take place.

All the intellectuals in our case studies claim to be ‘true believers’ of some polit-ical faith, although their tactical decisions change and ideologies that they mightdie for historically evolve and acquire new names. So, for example, from hisuniversity student days as an ultra-nationalist, pro-French Algeria supporter inthe 1960s to his veneration of leftist icon Che Guevara, 1968 hero Daniel Cohn-Bendit and New Left guru Herbert Marcuse in the 1980s and 1990s, de Benoistmaintained his support for a marked hierarchical elitism, a rejection of liberaldemocracy and its egalitarian impulses, and a desire to create homogeneousnational or regional communities in the context of a heterogeneous world. Musso-lini always retained his desire to overturn the hated liberal parliamentary system,but its turning would come not from the socialist Left but the fascist Right (or‘neither Right, nor Left’ fascist synthesis). In all the cases under consideration, wehave what Gentile called ‘mimicry’ and ‘syncretism’ in that the political move-ments in question either mimic or adopt for their own purposes aspects of the‘symbolic universe’ of traditional religions.1.

INTELLECTUALS FROM FAR RIGHT OR LEFT TO OPPOSITEPOLITICAL CAMP

In my first case study of political conversion, I investigate intellectuals who madeconversions from the far Right or far Left towards the opposite political pole. Anexample from the far Right towards ‘democracy’ and ‘New Left’ is Alain deBenoist in France. Irving Kristol, as well as Christopher Hitchens, migrated fromthe hard, Trotskyite Left to neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism. An example ofseveral conversions, first to militant communism and ‘reconversion’ out of the‘dogmatic Left’, is the writer Arthur Koestler. He describes his conversion tocommunism in the following vein after a cold, December evening in 1931 inwhich his car broke down, he was hung-over after a party, lost badly in poker,and ended up in the bed of an unknown female companion:

By the time I got back to my flat my decision was made, though I hardlyfelt it to be mine; it had made itself. Pacing up and down in my bedroom,I had the sudden impression that I was looking down from a height at thetrack along which I had been running. I saw myself with great clarity as asham and phoney, paying lip-service to the Revolution which was to liftthe earth from its axis, and at the time leading the existence of a bourgeoiscareerist, climbing the worm-eaten ladder of success, playing poker, andlanding in unsought beds.76

Extreme crises, stress, a search for meaning, guilt and suggestibility pushed Koes-tler towards a communist ideology that he had long been drawn towards. Heremained a communist for six years and describes his re-conversion away fromcommunism in The God That Failed after the emotional shocks of the Spanish Civil


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War, when he was captured and imprisoned. The re-conversion experienceinduced ‘a state of inner peace which I have known neither before nor since’.77

In de Benoist’s case, the major crises that prompted his political conversionincluded the loss of French Algeria in 1962, the key events of May 1968 and therise of liberal-leftist cultural power, historical crises of the anti-parliamentary Leftas a viable alternative to liberal democracy, the official demise of the Soviet Unionas the flag bearer of Marxism–Leninism in 1991, and the rise of the United Statesas the world’s sole remaining superpower (which led de Benoist to shift from aprimary anti-communist to a primary anti-liberal stance in the 1990s and newmillennium). Given the history of Vichyism and fascism, as well as the de-legiti-misation of the Right after World War II, de Benoist chose a long-term culturalstruggle against the other two tendencies of the revolutionary Right: politicalparties and extra-parliamentary violence. This differentiated him from otherrevolutionary right-wing movements. The crisis of faith in the hegemonic, neo-liberal ideology, which is today de Benoist’s number one enemy, is shared bysectors of the French and European Left, extreme right-wing political outfits likethe National Front (Front National, FN), left-wing movements in Latin America,Islamists, ecologists and even ‘welfare liberals’. It is in this context that de Benoistseeks alliances on the Left, Right and beyond in his attempt to smash liberaldemocracy. His strategy mimics the non-conformists of the interwar era.

The de Benoist conversion process took place in three distinct phases from the1960s to the 1980s, as liberalism became more hegemonic and as the anti-liberalcommunist alternative became exhausted. De Benoist sought to keep alive ahomogeneous notion of community identity throughout those three decades. Thisprocess led de Benoist from a colonialist, cultural defence of nation based on thesuperiority of the ‘white man’ and ‘race’ in the 1960s; the upholding of culturalseparatism based on scientism and IQ findings in the 1970s; and ethnoculturaldifferentialism based on the notion of the ‘right to difference’ in the 1980s.78 Thisnotion was itself mimetically borrowed from the French Socialists under formerPresident François Mitterand. As pointed out earlier, the ideological core thatremained included the cultural right to difference and a vehement desire tooverturn the hated materialist ‘disorders’ of liberalism, social democracy andsocialism.

It was clear that there was political space for the new Right ideology in that thefascist legacy was merely waiting for a time when new generations would jettisonthe taboo of co-operating with the far Right or neo-fascist mileux, as occurred inItaly in 1994, 2001 and 2008 and in Austria in 2000, when far-right-wing partiesjoined national coalition governments. As with Fascism and Nazism’s rise topower in Italy and Germany, it is impossible that these parties rise to powerwithout the collusion of non-fascists who invite fascists to the highest, executivepositions of the state as a prelude to the total conquest of the state.79 It is noaccident that extreme right-wing political forces made their mark in the 1980s and1990s as the anti-capitalist Left hit its most dramatic, existential crisis with the fallof the Berlin Wall in 1989. Other non-conventional options also flourished in theperiod, from Trotskyites to the ecological parties. There was also political spacefor a more intelligent, cultured Right that sought to distance itself from Nazismand Fascism, yet tried to subtly rehabilitate the ‘healthy’ elements of fascism fromthe Strasserites to Primo de Rivera or the conservative revolutionaries.80

De Benoist and his major think-tank GRECE (Groupement de recherche etd’études pour la civilisation européenne – Research and Study Group for European



Civilisation) were elitist, yet dynamic proponents of the ideology. It was aEuropean-wide movement of networks, think-tanks, publicists, intellectuals,journalists and ‘assorted angry men’.81 It sought to rehabilitate the legacy of therevolutionary Right through more acceptable legal and metapolitical mecha-nisms. It contributed to the rise of anti-immigrant politics, a questioning of liberaldemocracy, the EU, and globalisation processes, and ambivalence about culturalrather than technological aspects of modernity – egalitarianism, liberalism,multiculturalism and pluralism.82

While the larger cultural milieu has not promoted nouvelle droite ideas like amimetic contagion, it is clear that their ideas have had an impact in de-legitimisingthe major tenets of liberal democracy and expressing anguish about the project ofmodernity and the post-modern condition. Their ideas have been co-opted byconservative and extreme right-wing political formations. The cultural milieu ismarkedly different from the interwar years where authoritarian and totalitariansolutions were in vogue, spreading like wildfire from the Bolshevik Soviet Unionto Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain to Vichy France.

De Benoist remained a ‘true believer’ of the conservative revolutionary milieuand a metapolitical variant of ‘anti-fascist fascism’. Organisational cohesion wasattained through a diverse network of think-tanks and intellectuals and anattempt to infiltrate key sectors of elite public opinion in the state, bureaucracy,army, mass media and political parties.83 Collusion of establishment elitesensured the return towards a discourse that the late Jean Baudrillard dubbed adesire to return to a ‘white fundamentalist Europe’,84 excluding non-Caucasian,non-European, non-Christian immigrants. Fortuna, or a dose of luck, is necessaryfor any political movement. Fascism and Nazism could count on the timorous,pale responses from established authorities and the overwhelming fear of Bolshe-vism in both Italy and Germany in the 1920s. Certainly the liberal Left still retainsa heavy armour at its disposal in terms of cultural power in France and Europe,but this liberal Left is eroding with increasing questioning of identity, immigra-tion and the multicultural model that predates the events of 9/11.85 For thenouvelle droite, the Nietzschean willpower of powerful elites in the context oforganisational cohesion rather than luck will move Europe towards an anti-liberal, ‘spiritual’ revolution.

Sargant has suggested that religious conversion involves intense trauma, break-down and suggestibility.86 In order to make converts more suggestible, religiousfigures such as the Methodist founder Charles Wesley or even Maoist and Stalin-ist officials utilised extreme allusions to fear, guilt, division, small group experi-ences (heightening the perception that they were important) and a simple enemyor scapegoat to make the converts more suggestible. The more complete theconversion, the more the convert thought they were autonomously converting tothe new faith. Adding to the suggestibility of new converts, similar techniqueswere utilised from ancient times to modern evangelism: ecstatic drumming,hypnotic states, the ingestion of common substances and the induction of extremeemotional states.

In the fascist epoch, parades, ritual ceremonies, bonfires and festivals commu-nicated a profound feeling, which made the conversion experience mystical, tran-scendental, collective and meaningful. In de Benoist’s case, GRECE valorised theconservative revolutionary ‘heroes’ of the past such as Ernst Jünger and CarlSchmitt, made members feel that they were a special elite destined to help theregion, nation or Europe, held pagan festivals, and perpetuated a literary cannon


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that was martial, anti-materialist and identity-obsessed. After years of suchintense communal experiences, the convert is lost in the higher calling of thegroup experience.

Yet, as Gentile explains, despite the intensity of the conversionary experiences,they are inevitably short-lived. That is, a period of vitality of strength is followedby the waning of enthusiasm because of the passage of time, changing circum-stances that gave rise to the movement, generational change or crisis and collapsein the political movement from which it was created. GRECE is no longer thevibrant force it was in the 1970s, as generational differences and tactical disputesbetween the metapolitical and explicitly political wings sapped the movement ofits original revolutionary fervour born in 1968.

FROM NEO-FASCIST TO POST-FASCIST POLITICIANS

The second type of conversion is of neo-fascist politicians in Italy such asGianfranco Fini (the former leader of the MSI-AN) and Gianni Alemanno, thecurrent mayor of Rome. Both have claimed to supersede the old world of neo-fascism and purported to be ‘post-fascist’. In a 1995 MSI congress, Fini made his‘post-fascist’ turn. Fini has participated in the national coalition government,including the current one under Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing Italian PrimeMinister. In 2003, he was deputy Prime Minister of Italy and went to Israel toapologise for the ‘absolute horrors’ of Fascist Italey’s race laws after 1938 underMussolini’s Fascist Italy.

The question here is whether the two figures have converted to ‘post-fascism’or whether the entire political landscape increasingly converts towards some ofthe neo-fascist positions on identity, race, immigration, nation or region? It is truethat co-optation is not conversion, but the taboo of no longer co-operating withthe far Right was first broken in Italy, the land that gave us Fascism. Is this not anexample of historical mimesis at work?

I will not analyse the 10 conversion prerequisites here, but will comment onthe religious or mystical and political aspects of the MSI-AN, the parties thatproduced Fini and Alemanno. The march through the wilderness for the ghet-toised neo-fascists had its modest beginnings in 1977 and 1981 when neo-fascistsparticipated in Campo Hobbit, a festival of MSI youth that sought to transcend theexcesses of the terrorism of both Left and Right in the 1970s and re-think thesterile legacy of fascism.87 The camp sought to create alternative cosmologiesand strategies for a Right that was then outflanked by the liberal Left. The Hobbitwas written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, but it appealed to neo-fascistyouth like Alemanno because of its thirst for adventure, the quest of BilboBaggins and the hobbits against great odds, the Battle against the deadly FiveArmies (its martial theme), and the mystical song, meals and joy of comradesfighting for a common purpose. Campo Hobbit included campfires, mystical liter-ature and ideological exchanges between non-conformists of Left and Rightseeking alternative cosmologies and the overthrow of liberal democracy. Theseinitiation rites had all the ingredients of ‘political religions’ and certainly contrib-uted to the suggestibility of the new converts to a neo-fascism that had to adaptto changing times.

It was the French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche who called fascism the ‘joy ofliving’ and his fascist brother-in-law, Robert Brasillach, who defined it as the‘thirst for adventure’. It is said that, when Alemanno won, the Hobbit generation



came to power in Rome, a generation that remembers these shared conversionexperiences within the neo-fascist milieu and its antipathy towards liberal democ-racy and multiculturalism.88

In conjunction with cultural renewal projects like The Hobbit, the New Rightcreated think-tanks throughout Europe in a transnational spirit.89 It sought tochange the perception of the Right, tarred by the brush of fascism, and to rehabil-itate its legacy in more acceptable forms. Therefore Alemanno’s victory in Romeis a victory for pragmatic strategy, a strategy that downplays the Fascist past andstresses law and order and even democratic and environmental discourses. It isalso the story of a political climate in Italy and western Europe that has dramati-cally drifted decidedly towards the anti-egalitarian Right, particularly on cultural,regional and national identity questions. It is a victory based on the steadycultural and political return of a conservative revolutionary Right that wasthought buried in the ashes of World War Two.

Enter 28 April 2008, the victory of Alemanno as the new mayor of Rome. Heclearly has roots in the MSI and its successor the AN. He was formerly a nationalsecretary of the Youth Front of the neo-fascist MSI. He twice lost bids to enterRome city council in the 1980s. Alemanno persisted in defeat. In 1990, he enteredthe regional government in Lazio under the MSI banner. Lazio’s professionalfootball team is dubiously known the world over for its hard-core hooligansupporters with philo-fascist and anti-Semitic sentiments. In 1994, Alemanno waselected to the MSI’s successor, the purportedly ‘moderate’ or ‘post-fascist’ AN. Hewas re-elected to the Italian House in 1996, 2001 and 2006. Alemanno was one ofBerlusconi’s most competent ministers as his Agriculture Minister from 2001 until2006.

We should also remember that Alemanno’s rise would not be possible withoutthe collusion of established elites. Non-fascists like Berlusconi, Veltroni and Prodihave colluded in the rise of Alemanno and Fini, as well as the European turntowards a more anti-immigrant ‘white fundamentalist Europe’, which questionsthe merits of multiculturalism.90 It is also a historical truism that Mussolini’sascent to power would not have been possible without the vascillation of KingVictor Emmanuelle III and other political, military and economic elites that nolonger saw that the post-war crises could be resolved by liberals, socialists orconservatives, while also fatally believing that the future Fascist leader could betamed in a grand national coalition.91

Alemanno’s ‘post-fascism’ has been questioned by liberal critics. He certainlyhad brushes with the law as a former MSI member, as did others in the party fromformer leader Giorgio Almirante to his father-in-law, fascist diehard Pino Rauti.Rauti was sympathetic to the pro-Nazi Republic of Salò and belonged toshadowy, neo-fascist terrorist group Ordine Nuovo in the late 1960s.

Alemanno is not alone in his anti-immigrant appeal to the ‘silent majority’(white, Christian and European) in an increasingly familiar right-wing populistdiscourse.92 Across the Alps in France, FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked theEuropean continent when he reached the final round of the presidential electionsin 2002 using similar anti-immigrant themes. In Austria, in 2000 the populist, anti-immigrant Freedom Party joined the national coalition in what amounted to aninternational black day for Austria. In 2008, two extreme right-wing partiescombined to score 28% of the popular vote and were candidates to join thenational coalition government once again. Anti-immigrant parties scored impres-sive victories in supposedly mild social democratic bastions from Holland and


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Switzerland to Denmark and Norway. The New Right has made a comeback in aunified Germany, seeking to make Germany a ‘normal’ nationalistic nationagain.93

Alemanno’s dramatic rise to power was based on legal and cultural means. It isthe reverse of the old fascist formula of violently intimidating and killing politicalopponents through the black-shirted squads. In this sense, it mimics the gainingpolitical ascendancy of the New Right throughout Europe. When Pino Rauti splitwith from the AN to form the fascist Fiamma Tricolore after Fini took the AN in a‘post-fascist’ direction in 1995, Rauti claimed to continue the fascist legacy alleg-edly abandoned by the AN. Alemanno, however, stressed his ties to the cultural,legal wing of the neo-fascists.

Alemanno and Fini learned their lessons from neo-fascists of previous eras. TheMSI’s former leader, Giorgio Almirante (1969–87), had played the double game oflegality and illegality that was crucial for ‘movement fascism’, or what he dubbedthe strategy of the ‘cudgel and double breasted-suit’. Almirante was a minorfigure in the short-lived ultra–fascist Republic of Salò as a Minister of Culture in1944. His aforementioned strategy yielded modest results, reaching a high markof around 8% of the popular vote in the 1972 Italian elections. Yet, Almirante wasgrooming Gianfranco Fini, the future MSI leader, by moving the party away fromfascist symbolism as early as 1970 and declaring his support for the democraticsystem. This strategy would reap its harvest with Berlusconi’s stunning coalitioninvitation to the MSI and NL in 1994.

After Berlusconi swept the Right to power for the first time in 34 years in 1994,he was unceremoniously ousted from power after a short seven-month stint inoffice due to disagreements with coalition partners, particularly NL leaderUmberto Bossi. From 1996 to 2001 when the centre Left was in power, Berlusconiwas the leader of the parliamentary opposition. Between 2001 and 2006, Berlus-coni wrestled power from the centre Left again and included the MSI (now AN)in the coalition again with the NL. He made Gianfranco Fini, the AN leader, hisdeputy prime minister and Foreign Minister. Claiming to be ‘post-fascist’, Finialso took more ‘moderate’ positions on immigration. Because of the vicissitudesof Italian coalition politics, Berlusconi’s alliance was again ousted by RomanoProdi’s centre Left coalition. In 2008 his renamed party, Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL,People of Freedom), which merged with the former neo-fascist AN, was electedand he became Italy’s prime minister for a third time. The AN and NL are bothanti-immigrant (the Northern League more overtly), with the latter virulentlyanti-Southern and anti-Rome. Both parties were critical for Berlusconi’s coalitionsuccess.

FROM SOCIALISM TO THE FASCIST SYNTHESIS

I have already briefly examined Mussolini’s stunning conversion to the fascistsynthesis that began after 1914 and grew with the power of the war veterans’experiences after World War I. Mussolini was not alone in the period, as a host ofanarcho-syndicalists, anti-Marxist socialists and non-conformists searched for ananti-materialist Third Way against conservatism, liberal democracy and Marxistsocialism. That is, Mussolini’s conversion experience marked a generation inEurope with Henrik de Man in Belgium, Emmanuel Mounier and AlexandreMarc in France, and Primo de Rivera all converted to a Third Way that washeavily elitist, statist, authoritarian and sometimes corporatist. It was a political



conversion that sought to synthesise the two great revolutionary ideas of theepoch – nationalism and socialism – in an elitist, ‘spiritual’, activist and totalframework.

To make the conversion experience more authentic, non-conformists andfascists stressed style, feeling and a sense of national belonging that crossed Left–Right political and material divisions.94 Payne points out that the fascistsborrowed their brown, black, blue or green shirt styles from radical left-wing shirtmovements.95 D’Annunzio certainly played a major role in the emergence of afascist style with his capture of Fiume and his announcement of the CarnaroConstitution in 1920. The fascist style was grand, bold, explosive and militaristicand stressed a community of national belonging and destiny that was historicallyunique. Parades, flags, shirts, banners, rituals, ceremonies for the dead andoratorical flourishes by the divine leader created a suggestible climate that wascongenial for mass conversion and the erection of a novel ‘political religion’.

There are undoubtedly numerous interpretations of fascism from Marxist toFreudian and institutional to elite theory. A. James Gregor and Ernst Nolte arguethat fascism was a sort of mimicry of communist Bolshevism. Nolte insists thatfascism is a revolutionary imitation of communism and cites Merleau-Ponty’s1947 phrase that fascism is a ‘mimicry of Bolshevism’.96 Gregor has the boldestclaim, namely, that radical left-wing regimes such as Maoist China, the StalinistSoviet Union and others are ‘developmental national dictatorships’ of a fascistpersuasion.97 Girard’s insights are not incompatible with Nolte’s controversialthesis that fascism would not have been possible without the rise of communistBolshevism. In short, Nolte argues that, if there had not been a Bolshevik Revolu-tion in Russia in 1917, there would have been no Fascism in Italy in 1922 orNational Socialism in Germany in 1933.98 That is, communism was fascism’smimetic double, which fascism tried to both mimic and outflank in its search forpolitical power and struggle for mass identity formation.

In short, fascism was not merely a lackey of big business interests and wouldnot have been possible without a constant interaction with its radical competitorand imitator on the Left. This does not mean that fascism was completely autono-mous, but it did seek to provide a unique response to its leftist and liberalcompetitors by borrowing from its rivals. This imitation has emanated from theextreme edges of the Right and Left. Neo-fascists such as former MSI leader Gior-gio Almirante called Julius Evola, the architect of the Fascist manifesto of so-called ‘spiritual racism’ (in reality, a manifesto of actual racism and race laws),‘our Marcuse, only better’. Even as a Fascist Mussolini extolled the virtues of theanarcho-syndicalist Sorel.

FROM NATIONALIST AND MARXIST TERRORISTS TO NON-VIOLENCE

A number of terrorists have increasingly renounced violence and maximalistgoals in light of the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Marxist–LeninistSoviet Union, and cycles of terrorist violence that have reinforced the power ofstates.99 The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) decided to recognise Israel’sexistence and take the path of the two-state solution after 1988. In Nepal, Maoistsgave up their arms and participated in a national coalition government that aban-doned the monarchy. PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan has called for the globalspread of democratic civilisation, renounced narrow nationalism and arguedagainst the utilisation of violence.


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After the crisis spurred by his capture by the Turkish state in 1999, Ocalan nowcalls for a democratic civilisation in combination with another civilisational ethos(perhaps from the Middle East, what he calls the birthplace of civilisation) toforge a new, world civilisational synthesis. His conversion is a product of largelyexternal forces combined with internal reflections. What he has retained is theHegelian, Marxist notion that history progressively unfolds towards a higherspiritual, socio-economic and political reality on a global scale.

A former proponent of revolutionary armed struggle, Ocalan today valorises‘contemporary democracy’ and federalist principles, while longing for a newhistorical synthesis of world civilisations.100 A new ‘democracy of the people’,argues Ocalan, will fail outside Euro-American societies if it is not ‘superior’ towestern democracy.101 This bold assertion reinforces the Hegelian idea thathistory unfolds towards universal, civilisational progress and that ‘contemporarydemocracy’ is for now the highest expression of this progress. It is also intended tocounter what Ocalan views as the tendency of authoritarian states in the MiddleEast to rhetorically wave the banner of popular representation, while erodingdemocratic practices. If a new civilisational synthesis emerges, argues Ocalan, itwill need to build on the real historical progress made as a consequence of theemergence of ‘democratic civilisation’: individualism, the rule of law, rule by thepeople, secularism and women’s rights.

According to Ocalan, like de Benoist, the terrain of civil society becomes thecontested territory for revolutionary activity in a Gramscian vein. For Ocalan, theconquest of civil society is where revolutionary activity should be directedbecause it ‘comprises the tool of democratic possibilities - that opens the door todevelopments hitherto impossible’.102 Ocalan insists that the aim of a contempo-rary revolutionary is to supersede political and extra-parliamentary projects,while creating counter-hegemonic discourses in the cultural terrain outside thestate (e.g. sufi orders, dissident religious thinkers, legal networks), which will actas vehicles to change modes of thinking in the masses and eventually dislodgeantiquated, authoritarian political structures in many Middle Eastern states. WhatOcalan is really searching for is a Middle Eastern ‘enlightenment’ for Islamic soci-eties. He is convinced that we progressively evolve as human civilisations. Globaleconomic and technological interdependence, the relative autonomy of civilspaces in contemporary Turkey and ideological convergence processes in thepost-communist age allow Ocalan to engage in a Gramscian ‘war of position’ thatstresses the role of civil society consensus and non-violence in the changing ofhistorical, political consciousness.

As mentioned earlier, this conversion process is authentic in that it responds toprofound ideological, economic, and technological changes, but it also shareswith de Benoist’s conversion tactical acumen in the context of changed politicalcircumstances. Forced state incarceration accelerated Ocalan’s conversion out ofthe dogmatic Marxist orbit.

Girard, Conversion, Left and Right

At this point, I will examine how Girard’s ideas about mimetic rivalry might helpus understand political conversion from Left to Right or Right to Left, or Rightand Left and beyond. Girard’s notion of mimesis can be grouped under threeheadings: mimetic desire, metaphysical desire and the positive aspects of mime-sis.103 Mimetic desire is a nonconscious imitation of others. Mimesis seeks to gain



the object that the model desires. With metaphysical desire, we want to associatewith the other and our deepest desire is not objects but being. We are hypnotisedby the other. We can actually even convert into the identity of the other, or createa new identity by mimicking the ideas of the other. Finally, positive imitationinvolves an opening towards the other that is positive, selfless and heroic, a ‘goodcontagion’, the imitation of Christ being conversionary imitation.

If we relate Girard’s ideas to political conversion and symbiosis between Leftand Right, we find that Left and Right, particularly in the period of high ideologi-cal tension in the interwar years, imitated each other, both unconsciously andconsciously. Because fascism and non-conformism were ‘latecomers’ in politicalspace, they tended to more consciously imitate the Left. Hitler said he wouldmake ‘Munich the Moscow of our movement’, Mussolini praised the leftist syndi-calists, and the Strassers longed for a national, corporatist socialism within theNazi movement. Yet, the Left also consciously or unconsciously imitated theRight. Stalinism, Gregor argues, came to have national socialist or fascist traits.Both extreme Right and extreme Left are hypnotised with each other; the hatredof materialism, parliamentarism, capitalism, globalisation and the penchant forviolence, elitism, military virtues and party-militia frameworks uniting them. DeBenoist said he would vote for the Communists in 1984, praised Che Guevara,Gramsci and Marcuse, and called the Greens the sole remaining force able tochallenge triumphalist liberal capitalism.104 He also hated and envied the Left forits cultural decadence, its treason in converting to neo-liberalism, and its controlof the cultural terrain, which the New Right sought to control.105

We can say that the Left and Right are rivals for power, cultural control ordominance of political space. Yet, they are also rivals for creating a cultural andpolitical consensus that would be most suitable to the masses of Europeans.Moreover, they are also rivals in the search for an authentic identity, in the strug-gle to be who they are, or in the interpretive desire to be ‘authentic’ Europeans,however this is defined. Finally, a political conversion is positive since it is notmerely political, but also cultural and civilisational: it supposedly saves a civilisa-tion or people from cultural decadence and the worst tendencies of mass society.In focusing on culture, the nouvelle droite sought a conversionary imitation thatwas not modeled on Christ, but on Nietzsche, the virility of elites and the paganreturn to a culture that was heroic, healthy and ‘truly’ European (i.e. the antithesisof ‘slave’ cultures of mass Judeo-Christian monotheism, liberalism and socialism).It was a conversion process that had all the ingredients of a ‘political religion’,open to the few and claimed to take Europe back to its pagan, hierarchical rootswhere in Schmittian terms the political and martial dominated the economicrealm.

Conclusion

This paper has been based on the premise that intellectual ideas matter and shapehistorical processes. More importantly, it argues that political and ideologicalconversions are in part a quasi-religious experience for its adherents. FollowingGentile, I have insisted that contemporary conversionary experiences involveboth mimicry and syncretism vis-à-vis traditional established religions. Despitethe intensity of conversionary experiences, they are not necessarily permanentand durable. An ideological conversion has its rising springs and summers ofextreme revolutionary intensity, but also its declining falls and winters when


260 T. Bar-On

ideological fervour wanes due to crises, collapse, generational revolt and chang-ing political circumstances.

In short, the secular modern era did not abolish the pull of traditionalestablished religions, but only expressed it in unique forms that made the politicalrealm ‘sacred’ in either civic or political religions. Following Sargant’s insights, Ihave suggested that the most intense and durable political conversions are secu-larised variants of religious conversions. Furthermore, I have sought to highlighta model of successful political conversion with 10 ingredients and four case stud-ies of intellectuals and political figures on the Right, Left and beyond. Finally, Ihave also examined different conversionary processes from Girard’s conversion-ary imitation to authentic and inauthentic conversions and esoteric and exotericconversions. In most of the cases under consideration, the conversions wereauthentic, yet short-lived rather than durable since political circumstances, thepassage of time and ideological crises all opened up new political constellations,which undermined revolutionary fervour and the dogmas and rituals of the‘political religion’ in question. It is hoped that the model of ‘political conversion’and ‘religious experience’ offered might be tested more generically beyond thecognitive reach of the cases studied.

Esoteric and exoteric conversions are complicated by realpolitik considerations,which compel ‘true believers’ to sometimes mask their hatred for parliamenta-rism and democracy, as with Mussolini before the March on Rome and de Benoistwith his ‘leftist’ turn in the late 1980s and 1990s. The Irish Republican Army (IRA)has put down its guns since the implementation of the Good Friday Accords in1998, but its militants cannot easily give up on the dream of a united Ireland.Could we say that same about the PLO and the longing of its hard core support-ers to ‘liberate’ all of Palestine and excise what they consider the ‘alien’ Jewishstate from its midst?

The twentieth century was undoubtedly an extremely secular age with rivalideologies like liberalism, socialism and fascism all embodying a secular ethos.We might increasingly turn secular, but modern political projects resemble ‘polit-ical religions’106 with Communist Bolshevism, Maoism, Fascism and Nazismbeing the most overtly ‘religious’. Civil religions born in the United States andFrance in the eighteenth century, however, have proved more durable than theircounterparts, namely, totalitarian ‘political religions’. While totalitarian faithsseemed to have a greater intensity of mass support than ‘civil religions’, it is the‘civil religions’ that had the last laugh, precisely because they rely less on therepressive apparatus of the state. ‘Civil religions’ are allegedly more ‘freely’chosen by their ‘converts’ and hence their shelf life is more durable. Yet, in boththe cases of ‘civil’ and ‘political’ religions, Gentile is correct to point out that theyare short-lived. We engage in mimicry and syncretism in relation to establishedtraditional religions in the modern political realm, but we can never create ‘gods’that embody eternal ‘political religions’.

Throughout this paper Girard and Gentile have been my theoretical anchors.Gentile has understood that the ‘sacralization of politics’ is unique to the modernworld. All the political movements, intellectuals and ideologies considered in thispaper have been bathed in ointments that gave their political projects a sacredimprimatur.

Girard has helped us to situate political conversion in a larger cultural frame-work. Girard himself might be losing some faith in conversionary imitationalong the non-sacrificial, non-violent model of Christ, but this speaks more to



the spiritual crises of our times, the fall of firm political anchors, and the techno-logical and material processes of a global civilisation that is indeed Janus-facedin its possibilities for human redemption. There will always be positive modelsto imitate, but the question then arises what does positive mean? Surely a modelthat might question the violence inherent in both left- and right-wing politicalprojects is instructive and illuminating. Yet how about a negative model inwhich a new Duce uses eco-fascism as the new ideology of choice to hypnotisemillions? Will we see the skandalon coming, or will we recognise it when itarrives because it will be based on collective national, regional or Europeanbelonging and the feeling of apparent love for both our particular people and theuniversal planet? These are the times we live in and so we must think of apoca-lyptic possibilities and new political conversions, but will we be able to stopsuch ‘mimetic contagions’ from spreading uncontrollably into the heart of thebody politic?

Notes

1. René Girard, Job, The Victim of His People (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981) andViolence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

2. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research Undertaken in Collaborationwith Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987),pp.180–82; 205–15.

3. René Girard, “What is Happening Today is Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale”, Interviewconducted by Henri Tincq (trans. Thomas Hilde), Le Monde (11 November 2001).

4. See, for example, the Internet site of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), available at:http://www.quaker.org/.

5. Girard (note 2); René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1986).

6. See, for example, the story of Job and the unanimity of the community of tormenting Inquisi-tors. René Girard, Job, The Victim of His People (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press),pp.49–68.

7. Emilio Gentile, Politics As Religion. Trans. George Staunton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2006), pp.xiv–xix.

8. Gentile (note 7).9. Ibid., p.16.

10. Ibid., p.141.11. Ibid., p.16.12. Ibid., p.xv.13. Ibid., p.xv.14. Ibid., p.xiv.15. Ibid., pp.125–9.16. Ibid., p.xiv.17. Ibid., p.141.18. Ibid., pp.141–2.19. Ibid., pp.130–37.20. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Time, 1951).21. Sidney Hook, “Introduction”, in note 20, p.xx.22. Ibid., p.xxi.23. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30 (Paris: Seuil, 1969); John Hellman,

The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau 1930–2000 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

24. Gentile (note 7), p.141.25. Ibid.26. Ibid.27. Roger Eatwell, “Introduction: What Are Political Ideologies?”, in Roger Eatwell and Anthony

Wright (eds), Contemporary Political Ideologies (New York: Continuum, 2003) p.17.


262 T. Bar-On

28. Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Trans. Allan Cameron(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.60–71.

29. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite (Paris: Copernic, 1979), p.16.30. Ibid., p.25.31. Fortuna appears in The Prince. Machiavelli uses fortuna in contrast to virtu (i.e. knowledge,

wisdom, drive, talent or ability directed towards a goal) to refer to circumstances leaders cannotcontrol: family lineage, accidents, illness and the spirit of the times. Political reality, Machiavelliargues, is half fortuna and another half virtu. The goal of an astute politician is to limit the ‘flood’of fortuna through a mastery of virtu. See Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. Trans. W.K. Marriott(Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2007).

32. Quintin Hoare, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); JosephFemia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1981), pp.23–60.

33. De Benoist (note 29), p.19.34. William Sargant, Battle For The Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (London: Pan

Books, 1959).35. Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (New

York: HarperCollins, 2006).36. Tarik Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).37. See Gayil Talshir’s argument about the German Greens and their changing party platforms from

1980 to 2002. Gayil Talshir, “A Threefold Ideological Analysis of Die Grünen: From EcologizedSocialism to Political Liberalism”, Journal of Political Ideologies 8/2 (2003), pp.157–84.

38. Tamir Bar-On, “The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968–1999”, The European Legacy 6/3(2001), pp.333–51.

39. Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p.204.40. For the last point, see René Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (note 2). In this

work, he examines the notion of ‘good contagion’ or ‘nonviolent imitation’ based on a fundamen-tal change in personality as a result of the imitation of God or Christ. This is what Girard calls‘conversionary mimesis’ or ‘conversionary imitation’. See also René Girard and James Williams(eds), The Girard Reader (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2003), pp.290–91.

41. For one example, see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany,1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

42. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (NewYork: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp.261; 270–71.

43. Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).44. David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the

Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).45. Joachim Fest, Albert Speer: Conversations With Hitler’s Architect (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Griffin

(note 42), pp.250–309.46. Bar-On (note 39), p.155.47. Alain de Benoist, “Democracy Revisited”, Telos 95 (Spring 1995), p.75.48. Ibid.49. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp.200–242;

248–70.50. Richard Griffiths, Fascism (London: Continuum, 2005), pp.40–55; Michael Ledeen, Universal

Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936 (New York: Howard Fertig,1972).

51. Griffiths (note 50), pp.72–90.52. Bar-On (note 39), pp.201–203. See also Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “La nouvelle

droite de l’an 2000”, Eléments 94 (February 2000), pp.11–23.53. De Benoist and Champetier, “La nouvelle droite de l’an 2000” (note 52). See also De

Benoist’s veneration of the father of European federalism in Alain de Benoist, “Johannes Althu-sius (1557–1638)”, Krisis 22 (March 1999), pp.2–33.

54. The paper is The National Post.55. “Gianni Alemanno to blacklist Hollywood stars to promote Italian films”, The Sunday Times (4 May

2008), available online at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article3867788.ece;Malcolm Moore, “Rome’s new mayor promises purge of migrants”, Telegraph (30 April 2008).

56. Point 7 of Alemanno’s 16-point campaign manifesto, known as ‘Pact for Rome’ states: ‘Immedi-ately activate procedure for the expulsion of 20,000 nomads and immigrants who have brokenthe law in Rome’. Point eight hints at a darker project of ethnic cleansing: ‘Closure of illegal



nomad camps, rigorous and effective checks on legal ones and their progressive elimination’. SeePeter Popham, “Neo-fascist sweeps in as Rome’s mayor”, The Independent (29 April 2008), avail-able at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/neofascist-sweeps-in-as-romes-mayor-817128.html.

57. Piero Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)pp.22–6.

58. Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Vintage, 1996) pp.248–50.59. Nolte (note 49); Stanley Payne, Fascism: A History, 1919–45 (Madison, WI: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1995).60. Maurice Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1961).61. Ze’ev Sternhell (with Asheri, Maia and Sznajder, Mario), The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Trans. David

Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology inFrance. Trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

62. A.J. Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005).

63. Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1995).

64. Allen Douglas, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: George Valois Against the Third Republic(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

65. Hellman (note 23).66. Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981).67. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest (Summer 1989), pp.3–18.68. Ibid.69. In the 2008 Italian election for the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, the ‘hard socialist-

communist left’ won a combined 4.1% and 3.0% of the popular vote. In the 1976 election to theItalian Chamber of Deputies, the Communists received nearly 35% of the popular vote and theSocialists 9.6%. The leading Christian Democrats garnered 38.7%, thus making the Communiststhe second most popular party in Italy.

70. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007),“Introduction.”

71. This is the argument of Abdullah Ocalan, Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilisation. Trans. KlausHappel (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp.277–97.

72. Ibid., pp.295–7.73. Ibid., pp.277–97.74. Christopher Hitchens, “Why I’m (Slightly) For Bush”, (8 November 2004); “Of Sin, the Left, and

Islamic Fascism” (8 October 2001) The Nation.75. Roger Eatwell, “New Styles of Dictatorship and Leadership in Interwar Europe”, Totalitarian

Movements and Political Religions 7/2 (June 2006), pp.127–37.76. Arthur Koestler, Arrow In Blue, quoted in Sargant (note 34), p.90.77. Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing, quoted in Sargant (note 34), p.91.78. Pierre-André Taguieff, “The New Right’s View of European Identity”, Telos 98–99 (Winter–

Spring 1993–94), pp.99–125; Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse (Paris: Descartes et Cie,1994).

79. Robert Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism”, Journal of Modern History 70/1 (March 1998), pp.1–23.

80. Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2007).

81. Hellman (note 23), p.194.82. For the last point, see Woods (note 80), pp.39–45.83. Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite: Le GRECE et son histoire (Paris: Presses

de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1988), p.51; pp.213–17.84. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996), p.135.85. See, for example, Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of

Tolerance (New York: Penguin, 2006).86. Sargant (note 34), pp.13–20; 79–107; 128–55.87. Piero Ignazi (note 57).88. Peter Popham (note 56).89. Andrea Mammone, “The Transnational Reaction to 1968: Neo-Fascist Fronts and Political

Cultures in France and Italy”, Contemporary European History 17 (2008), pp.213–36.90. Baudrillard (note 84).


264 T. Bar-On

91. Paxton (note 79).92. Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Books, 2000).93. Woods (note 80).94. Noel O’Sullivan, Fascism (London: Dent, 1983).95. Payne (note 59).96. Ernst Nolte in François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism. Trans. Katherine Golsan

(Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p.47.97. A.J. Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 2000).98. Ernst Nolte (note 49); see also Marxism, Fascism, Cold War (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities

Press, 1982).99. David Whittaker (ed.), The Terrorism Reader, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2007), pp.28–38;

pp.292–4.100. Ocalan (note 71), pp.255–6.101. Ibid., p.237.102. Ibid., p.227.103. Girard and Williams (eds) (note 40), pp.290–91.104. Alain de Benoist, “Seeing from the New Right: Interview with Alain de Benoist”, RightNow!

(April–June 1997).105. See GRECE sympathisers such as Alain de Benoist and Marco Tarchi and their appraisal of May

1968: GRECE, Le Mai 1968 de la nouvelle droite (Paris: Labyrinthe, 1998).106. Emilio Gentile, (note 7); The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Trans. Keith Botsford (Harvard,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).


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Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry

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