British Fascism: a Discourse- Historical Analysis'

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H-Socialisms Cohen on Richardson, 'British Fascism: A Discourse- Historical Analysis'

Review published on Sunday, October 27, 2019

John E. Richardson. British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis. Explorations of the Far Right Series. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2017. Illustrations. 307 pp. $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8382-1031-5.

Reviewed by Joshua Cohen (University of Leicester) Published on H-Socialisms (October, 2019) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54281

Analyzing British Fascism

When Colin Cross wrote "British Fascism ended in May 1940 and has not since been revived under that name," he correctly assessed that Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement (UM), formed in 1948, neither hid nor disowned its fascist past. Still, this reference to the past and "ex-fascists" implied acceptance of the UM's claim to have transcended fascism, that it went "beyond both fascism and democracy."[1] The idea of fascism as a historical phenomenon existing mainly in the past was expressed in Stanley Payne's assertion that fascism was "primarily limited to Europe during the era of the two world wars."[2]

One of the most important contributions John E. Richardson makes in the excellent British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis is his repudiation of such analyses by demonstrating the long continuities within British fascism, its survival across the postwar period into the present, and, above all, the grave danger of regarding fascism as "over." He engages both with historiography and the "heuristic blind spot" of some political scientists that makes them reluctant to acknowledge contemporaneous movements as "fascist." For Richardson, this accounts for the continual formation of such myriad terms as "extreme right," "radical right," and "extreme right-wing populist"—he does not say it but "alt-right" suggests itself here too (pp. 20-22).

Discourse-historical analysis is apt for proving fascist continuities through a variety of methods, including demonstrating textual appropriations from earlier movements but also the ways fascists recontextualize language and ideas for the new social and political realities in which discursive events take place. Richardson points to the common imagery of blood, spirit, and sacrifice shared between the 1930s British Union of Fascists' (BUF)Marching Song and the "oi/punk" rock band Skrewdriver's song Hail the New Dawn (1984). However, he also shows Skrewdriver's changing of the original lyrics, including substituting the "struggle" of the original BUF lyrics for "battle," a word that speaks to the band's more virulent, militaristic idea of racial conflict, its longed-for racial triumph, and the hoisting of the "white man's emblem" (p. 74).

One of Richardson's main arguments and justifications for choice of methodology is that fascism is inherently duplicitous. He explains a key dilemma for British fascism: its mass appeal is directly proportional to the scale of its political deceit. The author makes transnational comparisons to highlight fascists' long tradition of concealing their true intentions, pointing to a subtle change in the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cohen on Richardson, 'British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis'. H-Socialisms. 10-27-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717/reviews/5192282/cohen-richardson-british-fascism-discourse-historical-analysis Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Socialisms lyrics of the National Socialist anthem The Horst Wessel Lied so that the song predicted that the flag of Adolf Hitler would soon flutter over "streets" rather than the "barricades" of the original lyrics, during the period in which the Nazis sought to emphasize their aim of achieving power through constitutional means rather than violent direct action (p. 23). In 1926, as part of this show of moderation, Hitler was not talking about Jews in public speeches, but when he spoke to his "own" audiences in Munich beer halls, almost every speech railed against international Jewry (p. 24). This speaks to the dissonance in fascist discourse between privately understood esoteric ideology, accessible perhaps to a privileged innermost circle, and what is deemed suitable for public utterance. A discourse-historical analysis is vital to unpack the contradictions in fascist discourse and to decode the clues in public rhetoric designed to reassure cadres that core ideology has not really been abandoned.

On esoteric versus exoteric ideology, Richardson especially acknowledges his debt to the work of Michael Billig on the British National Front (NF) Fascists:( A Social Psychological View of the National Front [1978]). Billig shows how antisemitic conspiracy theory and violence remained integral to the NF even as its public rhetoric emphasized racial populism and the defense of "white rights." However, Richardson goes well beyond Billig in periodization and in his engagement with the historiographical debate over the definitional minimum of fascism. Richardson engages directly with the argument of Roger Griffin that historians should "treat fascism like any other ideology," in other words, that fascism can be approached and defined as "an ideology inferable from the claims made by its own protagonists."[3] Richardson decodes fascist discourse, providing many examples of the disparity between textual surface and core ideology. Nevertheless, his argument that Griffin and "similarly idealist historians" form their conclusions regarding fascist ideology on the basis of the discourse produced by the fascists themselves is somewhat simplistic (p. 30). Griffin does not mean that fascist claims should be taken at face value but argues that academics are increasingly able to focus on the possibility of a "positive" fascist ideology, where before they had concentrated overmuch on defining the phenomenon through its negations (for example, anti-Marxism) and the style of fascist regimes in power.

Socialists will find important reaffirmation and development of left-wing interpretations of fascism in this work. Richardson argues convincingly against the idea of "fascist socialism," which forms one part of Griffin's definitional minimum: the idea that the rebirth of the national or racial community may well be presented as one that will transcend class conflict, tear down traditional hierarchies, and remodel capitalism to be non-exploitative of that community.[4] Richardson uses discourse-historical analysis to demonstrate his counterargument, reaffirming Marxist analyses that fascism is inevitably inegalitarian and aimed at terminating the progressive victories of the labor movement but—to build a mass movement—must hide the fact that it perpetuates capitalist exploitation of the majority.

The author shows that even at its most radical, fascism confronts not the essence of capitalism but the current situation in which capitalism is not in harmony with "race nationalism." Richardson highlights an NF leaflet that demanded an end to "capitalism in the form it now exists" but not capitalism in toto (p. 216). The proposed remedy was not to end private ownership or the profit motive but to make capitalism better serve the nation/race, including by expelling its damaging internationalist element. In following the argument that "revolutionary" fascists are fellow travelers or "dreamers" inevitably jettisoned by fascist movements, Richardson has chosen to work with an "orthodox" pro-capitalist discourse, leaving to other authors the task of assessing such dreams to

Fascism has consistently attacked international forms of capitalism and usury, and here Richardson emphasizes the ways this specific and limited "anti-capitalism" fits so neatly with the long continuity of fascist antisemitism. Anti-Jewish prejudice in this work is an exemplary demonstration of an ideological threat that links interwar and postwar fascism in Britain. Discourse-historical analysis decodes antisemitic language, even dating back to a period when the BUF's antisemitism was not overt. Richardson is particularly good at identifying polysemous noun phrases, which have an ostensible meaning and a coded one decipherable to those familiar with esoteric ideology. Thus, even in a publication from 1932, predating "official" BUF antisemitism, Mosley's cadres would have known exactly whom he was referring to when he decried "money power" and "alien interests" (pp. 105-6).

Richardson shows how codified antisemitism represents the continuity and evolution of a signal to core supporters, in a post-Holocaust context in which antisemitism is taboo in wider public discourse, and notes that antisemitic conspiracy theory remains essential to the fascist worldview. When fascist parties are more peripheral to democratic politics or reject constitutional means of winning power, the dissonance between their exoteric and esoteric politics narrows. For example, in his 1997 pamphlet Who are the MIND-BENDERS?, the British far-right leader Nick Griffin explicitly and crudely attacked Jewish control of the media and a Jewish plot to destroy Britain through multiculturalism and a liberal, internationalist agenda. However, when Griffin became chairman of the British National Party (BNP) in 1999, such overt antisemitism became a liability for any hope of electoral gains. Richardson shows that by the end of the 2000s, the antisemitic trope of Jewish media control was being conveyed in BNP discourse through nominalization of the noun phrase "controlled media," a way of propagating a conspiracy theory without explicitly articulating who exactly the "controllers" are (p. 260). Intertextuality and historical context also provide ready means for Richardson to identify antisemitism hiding behind such terms as "internationalists," "globalists," and "the New World Order."

Richardson argues that British fascism is a single-explanation political ideology, waging a single war against a single Jewish conspiracy. Here, readers might have wondered whether recent fascist attention to Islamophobia and anti-migrant xenophobia, and silence in public about the Jews, make this analysis outdated. However, Richardson demonstrates through an insightful analysis of successive layers of fascist discourse the intimate connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia. It goes thus: Muslims are only "here" because of the multiculturalist agenda of the "old gang" of political parties; multiculturalism is a plot to destroy white civilization; and it is the "alien liberal elite" and "cosmopolitans" (in other words, Jews) who will ultimately profit from the subjugation of white Britons (pp. 279-80).

Richardson uses the importance of context in discourse-historical analysis to take in the social, political, and cultural factors that shape discursive events. His aim is to assess not just what fascists say but also what they do. A discourse-historical approach equips the author with a variety of methods. The most important approach is diachronic, one that shows how fascist language has developed and evolved. Other important analyses include the intertextual and interdiscursive relationships among statements, texts, genres, and discourses: consider the placing side by side on the same page of two articles, one on rising immigration levels and one sensationalizing "immigrant crime." Also included are explanations of how discourses are inevitably socially situated, reaffirming

In chapter 1, Richardson situates his text in the wider field of fascism studies. Here, he agrees with historians, including Griffin, who identify in fascism a core ideology, albeit that the components of such an ideology have been hotly contested. Richardson notes that historians cannot agree on where fascism sits on the political spectrum—as a counterrevolutionary movement of the extreme right (David Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice [1999]), as a centrist extremism (Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man [1960]), or as a synthesis of left and right (Zeev Sternhell,Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France [1986]). An element of his argument with Griffin, developed in this chapter, is driven by reassertion of the right-wing nature of fascism. Richardson does not dispute the essence of Griffin's definition of fascism as a "palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism," meaning that it is motivated by a sense of national/racial crisis and the imperative for "rebirth."[6] However, he signposts the ways his book will argue that the definition is inadequate because of its failure to identify fascism not just as populism but also as right-wing populism. Richardson holds that Griffin's stance emanates from a "philosophical idealism" that relies on "the constitutive power imputed to political myth," stressing the movement of ideas to material reality (p. 31). Instead, Richardson reasserts that material reality underpins ideas and that political ideas are never separate from social practice.

Chapter 2 sets out the methodology in detail, including a case study of song lyrics as a means of describing textual appropriation, intertextuality, interpolation, and recontextualization. Chapter 3 represents a synoptic history of British fascism, explaining its development and introducing key people and political movements. This background context is invaluable for readers new to this subject area, especially given British fascism's protean, fragmented nature, its many schisms and moments of in-fighting, and the alphabet soup of abbreviations produced to name the various political parties and groupuscules. Just as important, this chapter introduces some of the continuities in personnel, ideology, and policies that link fascist literature produced sometimes decades apart.

The fascist idea of Britishness is explored in chapter 4. Richardson highlights the long continuity of fascist racism, including Mosleyite fascism. It has been claimed that as a Lamarckian, Mosley believed that culture rather than race was the main driver of evolution.[7] However, Richardson's analysis shows that Mosley's was always a "thoroughly ethnic understanding of Britain," equating to whiteness and excluding Jews (pp. 145-46). Richardson makes an excellent original contribution in his section on fascist views of the British countryside and environmentalism. For example, he skillfully shows how an NF pamphlet on renewable energy emphasizes that this alternative power source will bring self-sufficiency and true independence—subtly invoking the fascist insistence that Britain is not independent but subject to Jewish control.

Chapter 5 deconstructs the idea of fascism as a "third way" alternative to capitalism and communism. It is here that Richardson most reemphasizes fascism as far from inimical to capitalism. The most current chapter as a whole is chapter 6. This covers the fascist threat to civil society. Here the author shows how the murder of Jo Cox, British MP, in 2016 was inextricably linked to the racist far-right discussion of immigration surrounding the Brexit debate. True to the general approach taken in the book, Richardson connects contemporary events to the long fascist tradition of anti-liberalism,

This is an important book, demonstrating a high degree of analytical skill. Richardson manages to engage with the key theoretical discussions on the nature of fascism in a highly practical way, drawing on a rich variety of sources. Complex ideas are conveyed in clear prose. The book adds simultaneously to the debate on defining generic fascism and the specific historiography of British fascism—especially in showing that interwar and postwar movements are intrinsically connected. It will also serve as an exemplary text for academics and students in critical discourse studies.

Notes

[1]. Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1961), 195, 201.

[2]. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 354.

[3]. Roger Griffin, introduction toInternational Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, ed. Roger Griffin (London: Arnold, 1998), 15; and Roger Griffin, "Fascist Theories of Fascism: Presentation," in ibid., 238.

[4]. Roger Griffin, introduction to Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6.

[5]. See, for example, Kevin Passmore, "The Essence of Fascism," in Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Case Studies in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right, ed. Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, and Andreas Umland (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2006), 352-59.

[6]. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), 26.

[7]. Richard Thurlow, "The Developing Fascist Interpretation of Race, Culture and Evolution," in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 66-79.

Citation: Joshua Cohen. Review of Richardson, John E.,British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. October, URL:2019. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54281

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