Farage endorses far-right theories which have disturbing echoes of fascist propaganda in the 1930s.
What have Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’ got in common? Many things overlap in their ultra-right wing universe, but one of them is that they’ve all appeared on the madcap right wing internet TV station Infowars, hosted by millionaire conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Donald Trump protested vigorously at the May 3 decision by Facebook and Instagram to ban Infowars and Jones for hate speech (“Why are Feminists Fat and Ugly” is a typical offering). Trump continuously interacts with alt-right websites, including Breitbart, Infowars and Gateway Pundit, and retweets their material.According to newspaper reports, Nigel Farage has been featured on the shows six times. Which highlights some disturbing things about the person whose new Brexit party is likely to top the European elections on 23 May.
First is the very decision to appear on the show of a ranting ultra-right wing conspiracy theorist who promotes insane ideas – six times. And second what Farage actually said, namely:
- Left wingers and Islamists have formed an alliance to destroy Western civilisation and promote world government. This is because they both hate Christianity and the Judeo-Christian civilisation which is the foundation of ‘our’ (eg Western capitalist) society.
- Ordinary people are the victims of a conspiracy by ‘globalists’ – notably the European Union leaders and big business – who want to destroy nations and create a world government – a government by them.
- Climate change theories are a ‘scam’ designed to help globalists takes over the world.
An exchange with Alex Jones went like this:
Jones: “Why is the left allied with radical Islam?”
Farage: “Because they hate Christianity. They deny, absolutely, our Judeo-Christian culture, which if you think about it actually are the roots, completely, of our nations and our civilisation. They deny that. They also want to abolish the nation state – they want to get rid of it. They want to replace it with the globalist project, and the European Union is the prototype for the new world order.”
This seems like a repetition of the Islamophobic Bernard Lewis/Samuel Huntington theory of the clash of civilisations, but it has other connotations as well.
On Alex Jones’ show Nigel Farage repeated his attacks on Hungarian philanthropist George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, which promote multiculturalism from a liberal perspective. On Fox News Farage said that Soros was encouraging millions of immigrants to come to Europe and was “the biggest danger to the entire Western world”.
Hungary’s harsh anti-immigrant laws are called ‘the anti-Soros laws’ and Viktor Orban’s use of Soros as a whipping boy is widely seen as encouraging the rampant anti-Semitism in that country.
Farage’s views are a full-on acceptance of the rightist conspiracy theory of the New World Order. The term ‘New World Order’ was the Left’s description of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf war in 1990. Buti it was given a new meaning by American Christian fundamentalists who identified it with the ‘End of Days’, the final conflict with the anti-Christ, and the riding out off the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – a senario of course taken directly from the bible’s final chapter Revelations.
Alex Jones refers in his broadcasts to the Four Horsemen and the sign of the beast (‘666’ – the sign of the Devil). The New World Order theory does what many right-wing theories do, namely takes aspects of capitalist reality and then turn them into a lunatic theory. Jones for example talks about how smart phones are just devices for state surveillance which is going to be used to bump people off Uber and other services; picking up on the reality of surveillance capitalism and then turning it into something weird and exaggerated.
Tom Dispatch explains New World Order theorists in the following way:
“You know the story: The globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They’re hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They’ve burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America’s fragile government institutions. They want to replace the United States with the United Nations, erase national borders, and create one huge, malevolent international order.”
The New World Order run by globalists theory was until the last decade or so mainly the preserve of Christian fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists like David Icke who claimed the world had been hijacked by shape-shifting reptilians called the ‘Babylonian Brotherhood’ or ‘Illuminati’.
Icke’s theories were given an anti-Semitic twist by his endorsement of the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a plan for world domination by the Jews. Theories of a New World Order and Illuminati have long been seen as a cover for anti-Semitism.
Farage endorses the extreme right theories which have disturbing echoes of fascist propaganda in the 1930s, which alleged an alliance between Bolshevism and ‘cosmopolitan’ (ie Jewish) finance capital. The forces he sees as conspiring today to found a New World Order are the alliance of Wall Street bankers and politicians, the Left and Islamic fundamentalists.
Like the Nazi Communist-capitalist conspiracy idea, and like Donald Trump, Farage is attempting to utilise mass anger with big business and the bankers to created a movement which in the end defends them. In domestic politics this takes the form of accusing leftists and liberals of being part of an ‘elite’ defined culturally. Former commodity broker and multi-millionaire Nigel Farage, with strong support from Rupert Murdoch and the Telegraph, is of course a rather typical member of the real elite, the capitalist class. And he and his Brexit party are a major danger to the working class, democracy and multiculturalism.
Phil Hearse is the author of the pamphlet Full Spectrum Mendacity: Social Media and the Far Right, and one of the authors of Creeping Fascism: What It Is And How To Fight It
Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda
How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?