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From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular
right
1
Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 37, no. 1, (March 2003), pp. 27-50
Professor Roger Griffin
Department of History
Oxford Brookes University
Gipsy Lane Campus
Headington Oxford OX3 0BP
ABSTRACT
Conventional academic research into the legacy of inter-war fascism has generally
neglected the myriad minuscule and often ephemeral formations of the extreme right
which have sprung up since 1945, to concentrate instead on abortive attempts to
emulate the success of the Nazi and Fascist party-based mass movements, and more
recently on non-revolutionary ‘neo-populist parties’. However, when examined
closely many of them can be observed to behave as fully developed, highly
specialized, and largely autonomous grouplets that simultaneously form the
constituents of an amorphous, leaderless, and centreless cellular network of political
ideology, organization, and activism termed here ‘the groupuscular right’. As such
these ‘groupuscules’ are to be seen as the product of a sophisticated process of
evolutionary adaptation to post-1945 realities which allows extreme variants of
revolutionary nationalism to survive in the ‘post-fascist’ age in a form which is
largely resistant to attempts to suppress them, and may represent a number of
permanent, if mostly inconspicuous, threats to the liberalism of liberal democracy .
2
KEYWORDS: groupuscule; groupuscular right; extreme right; fascism; neo-fascism;
neo-populism; post-fascism; rhizome.
‘Too tiny to mention’
In traditional studies of the role played by extreme right in modern history it is size
that matters. Within the context of inter-war Europe this is only natural. Had the vote
for the NSDAP in national elections remained pegged around the pathetic 2.6% which
it garnered in 1928, and not soared within four years to over 34%, the party could
never have acted as a vehicle for Hitler’s so-called ‘seizure of power’, nor for the
numerous academic careers which have since been devoted to unravelling the
mysteries of Nazism’s sudden and devastating success as a political force after so
many years in the political wilderness. Yet the seismic upheavals and human
catastrophes of the period 1914-1945 epitomized in Hitler’s ‘legal’ route to
dictatorship seem to have branded the collective Western psyche so deeply that a
distorting conceptual framework is still generally applied when it comes to tracing
how the extreme right has evolved since his death. Three generations on it is still part
of academic and media common sense to assess the threat to democracy posed by
small extremist formations solely in terms of their potential to gain a mass following
and so become credible electoral or revolutionary forces.
The result is that the myriad minute, and at times highly ephemeral and
eminently unmemorable, grouplets which litter the more comprehensive surveys of
the extreme right in post-war Western democracies
2
tend to be treated merely as
embryonic Fascist or Nazi parties which simply withered on the vine long before they
reached maturity, and are thus consigned at most to the endnotes of modern history.
3
Professor Martin Blinkhorn, one of Britain’s most authoritative eminent historians of
the inter-war authoritarian right, thus speaks for a well-entrenched academic
orthodoxy when he depicts the gamut of the post-war extreme right as stretching from
highly conspicuous, significant parties such as the Italian Social Movement (MSI),
which at times make impressive inroads into the legitimate space of democratic
politics, to a zone which ‘seethes’ with a ‘profusion of groupuscules far too numerous
to mention — and mostly too tiny to be worth mentioning’, some of them
‘psychotically violent’.
3
Yet, no matter how invisible they are in the world of
conventional politics and political analysis, the two special issues of Pattern of
Prejudice
4
dedicated to samples of the groupuscular right, in conjunction with this
article which sets out to provide a generic conceptual framework for them, will
hopefully contribute to a minor ‘paradigm shift’ in the way they are perceived.
5
If it
takes place it will be ‘self-evident’ that it would be both unprofessional (as the
custodians of academic truth) and irresponsible (as the watchdogs of democracy) if
scholars treated all formations of the extreme right which have numerically negligible
memberships as abortive mass movements and hence of minimal significance or
concern.
6
It would be as if astronomers only studied celestial objects such as galaxies,
supernovae and red dwarfs, ignoring asteroid belts, sub-atomic particles, and ‘dark’
matter.
Defining the ‘groupuscule’
This article argues that since the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini radical changes have
taken place in the political culture and social climate within which the revolutionary
right has had to pursue its assault on the status quo and campaign for a new order.
These have brought about major adaptations in its ideology, style, organization and
4
tactics. They changes have been sufficiently profound to make it heuristically useful
to posit the emergence of a new genus of politics, ‘the groupuscular right’ with a
structure and dynamic quite distinct from that of the mass armed parties and
totalitarian regimes that typified the inter-war period. At this point it may be helpful
to offer a somewhat discursive definition of the concept that forms the focus of this
essay and of the articles on specific grouplets that accompany it thematically if not
temporally. Such a definition is to be regarded in the spirit of Nietzsche’s aphorisms,
namely not as the conclusion of research, but strictly heuristically as the starting point
for further investigation. It is thus in need of qualification and refinement when tested
against specific empirical phenomena almost from the moment it leaves the computer
key-board.
In the context of extreme right-wing politics in the contemporary age
groupuscules are intrinsically small negligible political (frequently meta-political, but
never primarily party-political) entities formed to pursue palingenetic (i.e.
revolutionary) ideological, organizational or activist ends with an ultimate goal of
overcoming the decadence of the existing liberal-democratic system. Though they are
fully formed and autonomous, they have numerically negligible active memberships
and minimal if any public visibility or support.
7
Yet they acquire enhanced influence
and significance through the ease with which they can be associated, even if only in
the minds of political extremists, with other grouplets which are sufficiently aligned
ideologically and tactically to complement each other’s activities in their bid to
institute a new type of society. As a result the groupuscule has the Janus-headed
8
property of combining organizational autonomy with the ability to create informal
linkages with, or reinforce the influence of other such formations. This enables
groupuscules, when considered in terms of their aggregate impact on politics and
5
society, to be seen as forming a non-hierarchical, leaderless, and centreless (or rather
polycentric) movement with fluid boundaries and constantly changing components.
This “groupuscular right” has the characteristics of a political and ideological counter-
culture rather than a conventional political party movement and is ideally adapted to
the task of perpetuating revolutionary extremism in an age of relative political
stability, however utopian in pragmatic terms.
Like any definition, the account of the groupuscule given above is both
exclusive and inclusive. It is clear that the term is not being used simply to refer to
any political organization which can only count on a few hundred members and
minimal or non-existent public profile and support. The Fasci di combattimento were
almost invisible until the rise of squadrismo. Yet it can be documented that Mussolini
always intended them to become the basis of a nation-wide elite force with a mass
following, and did everything he could to bring this about, to the point of turning his
‘anti-party’ into a political party in 1921. There is, however, some interesting research
to be done to establish whether Drexler’s Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) functioned
in fact less like a political party and more like a component of the Weimar
groupuscular völkisch right before it was transformed into the basis of Nazism’s
eventual mass armed party, the NSDAP, by the arrival on the scene of Hitler.
Nor does ‘groupuscule’ as it is defined here apply to ‘factions’ which operate
within a larger political movement, such as the Nationalists, Syndicalists, and
Futurists who struggled to assert their influence over early Fascism, or the ‘socialist’
faction which formed around Gregor Strasser and within Ernst Roehm’s SA until the
Night of the Long Knives eradicated it, since factions lack the autonomy which is a
feature of the groupuscule.
9
Nor should it be confused with the individual units of
large-scale capillary organizations, such as the individual squads of squadrismo, or, to
6
take examples from outside the extreme right, with the cells of the Resistance
movements within Nazi-occupied Europe, or of the ‘historical’ IRA. While they may
retain considerable independence, such formations are by definition integrated into a
bigger organizational structure through formal linkages and some sort of hierarchy of
command. Even the semi-autonomous cells of the Real IRA appear to be are subject
to some form of central control.
Other political entities which fail to qualify are non party-political nation-wide
movements with local branches acting as pressure groups for a particular cause, such
as the Cossack movement or the Movement for the Support of the Army in Russia.
The same would apply to one of Russia’s oldest post-perestroika ultra-nationalist
movements, Pamyat, since its local branches operate self-consciously as components
of an overarching movement and seek to attract mass support. A think-tank such as
GRECE is also excluded because it is too closely linked through personalities and
projects to other constituents of the French New Right to be treated as autonomous,
and is in any case of such a high public profile that it can be considered an integral
part of mainstream French political and intellectual culture.
10
The concept might become clearer, though, if we cite two examples which
would be included in our definition. The US Christian Identity (CI) movement, a
blend of white supremacism with Christian fundamentalism that behaves like a hybrid
variant of fascism,
11
consists of some 102 groups active in 35 states with an average
of some 500 members per ‘church’. CI has no central authority or ‘synod’, but a web
of loose linkages exists both between groups and with other manifestations of the
extreme right, endowing it with ‘groupuscularity’. To take an example nearer to the
home of this journal, when Blood and Honour, a grouplet dedicated to organizing
White Noise concerts in the UK, was founded by Ian Stuart of Skrewdriver in 1988 it
7
was ‘not a new fascist party, but an organization with no membership’.
12
Since then
the White Noise subculture has become an international movement embracing a wide
range of right-wing appropriations (carried out in a spirit that was often a profound
travesty of the original political tendency of the genre in question) of skin-head ‘Oi’
music, punk, heavy metal and black metal performed to whip up ritual hatred against
racial and ideological enemies. Structured around numerous autonomous but
interconnected nodal points of organization, performance, production, and distribution
Blood and Honour, it quickly evolved into an international, centreless, non-
hierarchical politico-cultural entity with a groupuscular rather than a hierarchical
structure. As such it is able to play a significant if largely undetected part in the
international right as a whole, especially in the USA, the UK, Scandinavia, and
Russia, both through attracting racists susceptible to ideological ‘education’, also
through its links and associations with other types of right-wing groupuscule, and its
association with ‘mainstream’ parties such as the National Front and British National
Party in Britain. (It is perhaps emblematic of the way traditional party-based fascism
as a whole has been groupuscularized that in the 1970s White Noise was also the
name of a racist punk music network directly controlled by the UK’s National Front.)
Auxiliary concepts
It will hopefully clarify rather than complicate the definitional framework being used
in this article if we introduce three supplementary concepts. The first is that of
‘uncivil society’. The concept of civil society or civic society has become well
established in the political sciences to refer to the social sphere which is adjacent to
the space occupied by formal party-politics and which is so crucial to the cultivation
of humanistic values and to the institutionalization and internalization of a democratic
8
ethos in liberal societies. Recently some scholars have made a convincing case for
introducing the concept ‘uncivil society’ to help conceptualize the segment of civil
society without which currents of extra-parliamentary protest, anti-liberal ideologies,
and anti-systemic politics cannot assume organizational form. Two important articles
have argued that it is ‘uncivil society’ rather than party-politics that now plays the
most crucial role as an incubator and reservoir of extreme right-wing ideology in
some contemporary democracies.
13
Moreover, it is a concept that already has proved
to have considerable heuristic value when assessing the role played by the broad
swathes of disaffection with the Weimar government within German civil society in
making the dramatic rise to power of Hitler possible.
14
‘Uncivil society’ also has
considerable heuristic potential when applied to deepening our historical
understanding of the emergence of an organized populist political right in fin-de-
siècle Europe in countries such as France, Italy, Germany and Romania, for example
when evaluating the significance of the völkisch movement in the genesis of
Nazism.
15
The second arises from an attempt to clear up a deep ambiguity in the term
‘movement’ (an ambiguity common to its equivalent in most European languages).
16
This term can apply to a relatively well delimited, homogeneous, and hierarchical
ideological force with a common set of clearly conceived goals, possibly even
expressed in joint manifestos, such as the Chartist, Suffragette, or Civil Rights
movements. For simplicity this type can be referred to as ‘monocratic’ since it has one
main axis or spine of power. ‘Movement’ can equally well refer to a poorly delimited,
heterogeneous, loosely co-ordinated, and hence ‘polycratic’ current of ideas and
values. The hall-mark of such a movement, which embraces most of the ‘isms’
familiar in the history of culture, ideas, and art (Renaissance, decadence, modernism
9
etc.), as well as far-flung, highly diffuse social campaigns such as those of feminism,
the New Age, Animal Rights, and anti-globalization movements, will have a
minimum of central coordination or formally shared objectives, and tend to spawn
numerous internal factions, subcurrents, conflicts, and ‘dialects’ of the central vision.
To complicate matters further, movements described by generic terms will tend to
refer to heterogeneous ideological or artistic ‘polycratic’ movements’ (futurism,
fascism), even though they may well be made up of individual ‘monocratic’
movements’ (Marinetti’s strand of Futurism, the British Union of Fascists). Thus the
NSDAP was a monocratic movement operating within both the ‘Los von Weimar’
and völkisch movements in Germany, which were themselves polycratic, and, some
would argue was, part of European fascism, another polycratic movement.
The third and, perhaps the most important auxiliary concept which can help
illuminate the elusive nation of the ‘groupuscular right’ is the ‘rhizome’. Its use was
pioneered in the spirit of post-structuralist radicalism by Deleuze and Guatteri
17
to
deepen our insight into social phenomena to which, metaphorically at least, the
attributes of supra-personal organic life-forms can be ascribed, but which are not
structured in a coherently hierarchical or systematically interconnected that would
make arboreal or dendroid metaphors appropriate. When applied to the groupuscular
right the concept ‘rhizome’ throws into relief its dynamic nature as a polycratic
movement by stressing that it does not operate like a single organism such as a tree
with a tap-root, branch and canopy, and with a well-defined inside and outside,
beginning and end. Instead it behaves like the tangled root-system of some species of
grass and tuber, displaying ‘multiple starts and beginnings which intertwine and
connect which each other’,
18
constantly producing new shoots as others die off in an
unpredictable, asymmetrical pattern of growth and decay. If a political network has a
10
rhizomic political structure it means that it forms a cellular, centreless, and leaderless
network with ill-defined boundaries and no formal hierarchy or internal organizational
structure to give it a unified intelligence
Once these three concepts are applied to the groupuscular right, then the
original definition can be amplified by stating that it is a movement whose natural
habitat is uncivil society, rather than political or even civil society, and is both
polycratic and rhizomic in character.
Locating the groupuscular right in history
Even such a provisional discursive definition makes it possible to locate the
groupuscular right in modern history with some precision. Certainly it is plausible to
suggest, as Kaplan, Weinberg and Oleson do in their study of the WCOTC, that it has
affinities with the ‘cultic milieu’ that has formed at several points in history, notably
in Judea under Roman occupation (the fractious anti-Roman front that is so a fact
scurrilously parodied in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian), and in the religious
counter-culture of the Reformation that gave rise to the millennarian sects studied by
Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium. However, it should be pointed out
that the esoteric qualities displayed by WCOTC are atypical of the groupuscular right
as a whole, and that there are profound differences between relatively homogeneous
religious cultures that spawn ‘cultic milieux’ and the secularized, fragmented,
centreless modernity in which the right wing groupuscule has arisen. Also, when
stressing the contribution of the particular ‘cultic milieu’ formed by the 60s counter-
culture it should be remembered that the first fully-fledged groupuscules to perpetuate
revolutionary nationalist schemes formed over a decade before the Beatles, as the
articles by Coogan and Bale make clear.
11
Instead, I would argue that the groupuscular right is to be seen first and
foremost as a product of a ‘post-fascist’ era. The two key conceptual tools to enable
us to grasp the salient implications of this approach are a sophisticated grasp of
ideological transformation and a refined theory of generic fascism. The first is
provided by Michael Freeden’s theory of ‘ideological morphology’.
19
This conceives
every concrete manifestation generic political ideology as consisting of a cluster of
‘ineliminable’ components, plus a host of contingent (adjacent and peripheral) ones.
The organizational and institutional forms, style, and specific contents of programmes
and policies adopted by an ideology such as socialism or liberalism will naturally vary
significantly from age to age and according to the national context. Yet, at the heart of
each ideology lies a simple or compound concept which for conventional (nominalist,
cultural) rather than essentialist (idealist, realist) reasons is not contestable.
Thus every socialism will always contain a proclaimed commitment to
equality and social justice, yet a huge variation will be found in the role ascribed to
such concepts as state planning and the state control of capitalism (adjacent in some
brands of socialism and peripheral in others), or the commitment to reusable energy
(peripheral, though one day perhaps adjacent) and single faith schools (peripheral). In
other ideologies, such as liberal conservatism or ecologism, the same concepts would
occupy a different position of centrality or peripherality. Conceived in this way the
‘same’ ideologies can be identified in the different guises they assume from country
to country and in their evolution down through the decades under the impact of
complex historical and socio-economic forces.
For decades the state of chaos in fascist studies would have made Freeden’s
analysis well-nigh impossible to apply to generic fascism because of the acute lack of
scholarly consensus over what constituted the ‘ineliminable’ cluster of concepts that
12
defines it. Over the last decade there has emerged growing explicit (theoretically
formulated) or tacit (pragmatic) acceptance by academics working in the field that
fascism’s permanent core is made up of the vision of a regenerated political culture
and national community brought about in a post-liberal age.
20
The notable exception
is Marxists, who by definition are ideologically committed to seeing fascism’s
defence of (retention of?) capitalism and counter-revolutionary (anti-socialist?)
aggression as ‘ineliminable’ rather than adjacent or peripheral. Once approached as a
permutation of ultra-nationalism bent on cultural palingenesis (rebirth), it becomes
possible to see that the actual forms adopted by fascism in the inter-war period were
contingent on a particular, and hence ephemeral, historical climate.
It was the systemic crisis of liberalism which followed the First World War,
compounded by the Russian Revolution and the ‘nationalization of the masses’ which
the war had done so much to bring about, that created the unique conditions in which
a revolutionary, populist variant of nationalism, fascism, could manifest itself as a
new type of party-political force. The universal and extraordinarily palpable sense that
a profound structural crisis was occurring in the nature of modern civilization and
history meant that inter-war fascism combined intense ideological productivity with a
deep impulse towards dynamism and activism, an elitist, cadre aspect with a ‘mass’,
populist one, a socially conformist, conservative facet with an anarchic, revolutionary
thrust, and a paramilitary with an electoral dimension. These element were all welded
together into a hierarchical, tendentially monocratic movement in the most successful
examples, Hitler’s NSDAP and Mussolini’s PNF, thanks largely to the charismatic
forces invested in the leader.
The two crucial points to infer from this analysis is first that the armed party
with its paramilitary uniforms, charismatic leader, ultra-chauvinist rhetoric, and
13
spectacular, ‘aesthetic’ style of politics, though universal features of fascism at the
time and widely associated with its ‘essential’ nature, were only contingent,
epiphenomenal attributes as far as its generic nature is concerned. Furthermore,
corporatism, anti-Semitism, or eugenics were never more than peripheral to its
generic core, no matter how central to the practice of its specific particular
manifestations. Once the particular configuration of forces that shaped inter-war
history disappeared, fascism was bound to undergo radical change in the outward
form it took. Second, the party-political manifestation of fascism as a ‘total’ force
combining an electoral party with a paramilitary revolutionary movement was only
possible in conditions of acute structural crisis affecting both liberal democracies and
conservative regimes alike.
Slime mould (myxomycota) is a hybrid life-form made up of countless single-
cell organisms that thrive in the conditions of extreme damp found, for example, in
abandoned English country cottages. Though it has no central nervous system, it has
the remarkable property of forming into a brainless, eyeless super-organism that
somehow moves purposefully like a mollusc or slug animated by a single
consciousness.
21
It was only the extreme conditions of inter-war Europe that allowed
the disparate aspects of the extreme right to coalesce in the party-political equivalent
of slime mould in certain countries. But fascism’s classic inter-war features, such as
the charismatic leader, youth movement and oceanic assemblies so eagerly mimicked
by inter-war para-fascist conservative regimes (e.g. Franco’s Spain), can be safely
regarded for heuristic purposes as peripheral rather than eliminable components, as
can its incarnation in the form of a slime mould-like unitary organism.
. On the basis of the above considerations it can be argued that the post-World
War II ‘groupuscular right’ owes its existence principally to the new configuration of
14
historical forces that emerged with the victory of liberal democracy over the Axis
powers and its apparent success in resolving the sense of the imminent collapse of the
West which dominated the Europeanized world in the inter-war period. Crucially, the
return of the liberal capitalist system to relative stability and hegemony after 1945
coincided with the fact that for a whole generation the rhetoric of national rebirth was
now widely identified with calculated inhumanity on an inconceivable scale. The
combined effect was to reduce drastically the ‘political space’ available to the
revolutionary right. In the decades that followed the cultural climate became ever less
propitious for it, as the broad mass of Westerners were increasingly de-politicized and
‘de-nationalized’. They were henceforth immune to the appeal of ultra-nationalism,
militarism, and sacrifice which had made possible the phenomenon of ‘war-fever’ in
1914 and whose prevalence had been a prerequisite for the rise of fascism. The
nation-state itself shrank in importance under the impact of globalization, and with the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire the extreme right was
deprived of a major rationale for its continued existence.
This conjuncture of events radically transformed the political culture in which
the extreme right had to manoeuvre. It now had to survive in the absence of the
objective conditions of systemic crisis which had given its call for a ‘new order’ based
on total political and cultural regeneration extensive resonance with the mood of the
times after 1918. As a result, the constituency of those spontaneously drawn to
revolutionary nationalism dwindled in most countries to effective insignificance,
depriving it of the critical mass needed to operate as a form of charismatic politics, or
in other words a modern ‘political religion’. The constituent components of the
extreme right mass movement could no longer coalesce. The well-head of charismatic
populist energies had run dry. The age of ultra-nationalist slime mould was dead. To
15
that extent Ernst Nolte was right to refer to fascism in the form pioneered by the
Action Française and consolidated by Fascism and Nazism as an ‘epochal
phenomenon’ that for practical purposes ceased to exist in 1945.
22
However, fascism did not die in Hitler’s bunker. Following a Darwinian logic
of mutation, the forces of revolutionary nationalism instinctively followed two
survival strategies in the ‘post-fascist age’. One was to try to maintain its electoral
appeal by playing down or shedding altogether its revolutionary programme and
translating it as far as possible into the language of liberal democracy, producing a
curious hybrid of democratic form with anti-liberal contents that allows the radical
(reformist) and extreme right to collude.
23
The result was the appearance of parties
that have come to be widely categorized as neo-populist. The other was to abandon all
aspirations to become the nucleus of a mass movement, and instead to take the form
of a cadre organization run by a small self-appointed elite of activists for ideological,
organizational, or subversive ends. The illusory prospect of having a revolutionary
impact on society was kept alive by keeping the grouplet open to linkages with
kindred spirits on the extreme right and publicizing its existence through effective
propaganda directed at the chosen few.
24
The post-war right-wing groupuscule was
born.
The new unit of ideological and activist energy adopted by fascism was
perfectly in tune with several processes which it underwent to adapt to a climate in
which large pockets of political space were now denied it, forcing it to look to every
nook and cranny in civil society it could find. The most important of these was a
metapoliticization of its ideology, accompanied by a conscious assault on the cultural
hegemony of liberalism, and a far-reaching internationalization of its revolutionary
vision, this manifested itself in such phenomena as a stress on the European base of
16
all ethnic nations, the universalization of Nazism, the growth of a Third Position
which seeks international (including Third World) allies in the struggle against the
only remaining superpower.
25
This also led to a growing collaboration and
ecumenicalization of individual groups and faction in a spirit that may seem ‘post-
modern’ but is actually deeply anti-post-modern in its longing for syncretism and
synthesis.
26
As if to consolidate its place within modern politics, two further factors
then emerged in the course of the 1990s that made the groupuscule in perfect tune
with the dominant Zeitgeist in the West: the growing public perception of an all
pervasive cultural globalization, and the capillary penetration into the nervous system
of planetary society of the World Wide Web. Together they guaranteed that each
groupuscule, no matter how small, could act as a nodal point in a vast, constantly
evolving, network of extremist organizations of far greater significance than the sum
of its parts: the groupuscular right.
The primacy of the groupuscule in post-war fascism
Empirical corroboration of this line of analysis is provided by the fact that where
conditions of extreme socio-political breakdown permitted it, notably South Africa in
the run-up to multi-racial elections, post-Communist Russia and post-Soviet
Yugoslavia, the extreme right reverted to assuming forms of populist movements and
mass-based parties reminiscent of those which emerged during the violent upheavals
of inter-war Europe. However it is a sign of the times that even in the conditions of
acute systemic crisis that characterized post-communist Russia, a complex
groupuscular right quickly formed in the fledgling civil and uncivil society alongside
a number of conventional political parties representing extreme and radical right
17
brands of nationalism. One of the factors that fuelled its rapid growth was the
readiness of Russian elites to cooperate with the European New Right and extremist
groupuscules to propagate their analyses of the national crisis.
In other words, internationalization and metapoliticization combined with the
new globalized forms of electronic communication to enable highly specialized
variants of fascism to rush into some of the gaps which had so dramatically opened up
in Russia’s political system and into the spaces, both large and capillary, that had
become available in its society for both civil and uncivil forms of cultural and
ideological production. Meanwhile, the powerful thrust towards creating a liberal-
democrat, laissez-faire capitalist society after eight decades of a state-controlled polity
and economy prevented the revolutionary nationalist currents fusing into a single
movement in the manner of the NSDAP. As a result, Russia has become the most
fertile habitat in the world for the creation of both groupuscular and non-groupuscular
formations of ultra-nationalism with a bewildering variety of individual ideological
components. Moreover, as party-political fascism declines the groupuscular rights is
becoming increasingly energetic in its exploitation of uncivil society to keep the
prospects of national revolution open.
27
Russia exemplifies the basic pattern exhibited by the extreme right throughout
the Western world since the defeat of Nazism. Everywhere it is the groupuscule rather
than the party that has become the typical organizational unit in which fascism now
manifests itself, as the personal journey through the changing landscape of the British
extreme right charted by one particularly articulate and self-aware British ideologue,
Troy Southgate, illustrates so well.
28
It is another sign of the times that he recounted
his pilgrimage from party activist of the UK’s National Front to prolific groupuscular
ideologue increasingly drawn into the orbit of national Bolshevism and neo-anarchism
18
in an article published in the English-language version of the Russian Web-newspaper
Pravda.
29
This paper now specializes in making available analyses of the world
situation which would have had many of editors of its Soviet forebear rolling in their
graves.
To summarize the story so far, the dominant expression of fascism in the inter-
war period was the armed party which pursued the goal of creating a mass base for the
revolutionary overthrow of the liberal system. It was only in some cases (notably in
Italy, Germany and France) that the general public been previously made susceptible
for such a development by the presence of prolific ultra-nationalist cultural production
which in retrospect can be seen to have displayed elements of groupuscularity. Since
1945 it is the groupuscule which has become the dominant manifestation of
uncompromising, undiluted revolutionary nationalism. Its effectiveness as an
incubator and reservoir of extremist energies is enhanced by each individual
groupuscule’s real or potential relationship with other right-wing groupuscules and its
resulting integration into a groupuscular right which has a rhizomic rather than
arboreal structure. Party political expressions of it are now either subordinated to it in
importance, or have assumed a ‘neo-populist’ guise which makes them peripheral to
the revolutionary mission of the extreme right.
The heterogeneity of the groupuscule
To have defined the groupuscule ideal-typically and attempted to locate it within the
history of revolutionary nationalism still leaves a lot of idiographic flesh to be put
onto nomothetic bones. It will soon become clear from the articles to which this
article is a companion (i.e. in the two special issues of this jounral devoted to the
19
groupuscular right)that accompany this essay that each right wing groupuscule has a
highly individual countenance. For one thing it will have a particular blend of three
primary activities, namely ideological elaboration and dissemination; coordination
and linkage with other right-wing parties, organizations, and groupuscules; and
planning and carrying acts of protest or subversion against the system or of aggression
against ideological enemies. To take the groupuscules covered in the two special
issues of Patterns of Prejudice, a minute sample of the phenomenon, , WCOTC and
AG seem to play a mainly ideological role, HF and ABND a principally co-ordinating
one, ELF both ideological and co-ordinating, while WAR, NR, NA, and GUD and
NBP blend all three. It should also be stressed that the phrase ‘acts of protests or
subversion’ covers an extremely wide range of activities from a small-scale symbolic
one — as when GUD once disrupted the showing of Shoah, the famous documentary
on the Holocaust on a university campus in Paris — to carrying out the Bologna train
station bombing as part of Italy’s terrorist ‘Strategy of Tension’.
30
But even when their role is primarily ideological, some groupuscules (e.g.
WCOTC, WAR, NBP, AG) are much more concerned with reaching a wider public
through exoteric, openly propagandistic versions of the core ideology than others,
whose information, analyses and declarations are intended for the initiated only. This
can lead to a considerable difference in public profile of a group’s leader, so that Tom
Metzger (WAR) is well known in the US, and in the mid-1990s Aleksandr Dugin
(AG) acted as official advisor to the president of the Russian parliament.
31
By contrast
others (e.g. GUD, ABND) appear to operate on the principle of leaderless, or at least
anonymous, resistance. In between there are a number of groups led by prolific
ideologues well-known in right-wing circles but who have a minimal public presence,
such as the ELF (Francis Parker Yockey), NR (Christian Bouchet), and the NRF
20
(Troy Southgate). Even the most extroverted and media-genic of the new breed of
groupuscular leader has nothing of a ‘Führer’ about him.
There are also considerable variations in the relationship of groupuscules to
democratic institutions, since some, like the NBP in Russia and the Nordic Reich
Party in Sweden, have actually put up election candidates in the past which points
either to lingering aspirations to break through into conventional political space or to
an element of hybridity between groupuscularity and party politics.
32
Even the
assumption that an extreme right-wing is necessarily ‘anti-systemic’ needs to be
treated with caution, since in the not so distant days when anti-Communism was the
driving force of the West’s foreign policy, Italy, Greece, Turkey, France, Belgium,
Portugal, and Spain, not to mention Latin America, provided concrete examples of
largely covert collusion between elements of the ‘system’, mainly in military,
intelligence, and judiciary circles, and the terrorist right.
33
In the USA as well, some
rightist groupuscules such as the Minutemen were secretly supported by the forces of
law and order and formed vanguards devoted, not to bringing down the state, but to
reinforcing its effectiveness as a bulwark against the dangers posed by communism
and the ‘softening’ of liberalism.
It is worth stressing at this point that there is considerable divergence within the
extreme right in the diagnosis of what constitutes ‘the system’ and who are the
enemies of the nation or the race.
34
Thus, while neo-Nazi groups like AN principally
attack the liberal ethos which has ‘allowed’ or ‘encouraged’ multi-culturalism and
racial mixing, they do not display the same venom against global capitalism which
characterizes Third Positionists - the former attack capitalism as a symptom of ZOG
(Zionist Occupation Government), whereas the latter do so because of the perceived
need to introduce an economic alternative to capitalism. The British NRF and
21
Belgium-based Parti Communautaire National-Européen (PCN), heir of the
pioneering Third Positionist Jeune Europe of the 1960s, for example, openly refer to
non-Strasserite Nazis and old-style fascist nationalists as ‘reactionaries’ or use the
term ‘fascists’ pejoratively, claiming that it was fascism’s failure to destroy the
capitalist system that compromised its revolutionary impetus.
Even here boundaries can become fuzzy, and ideological poisitions more
reminiscent of sand-dunes than mountains. WAR, for example, blends Third-
Positionist ideology with unmistakable elements of Nazi Aryanism and biological
racism. To take another example, according to the Website of the groupuscular Front
Politique in early 2002, GUD had entered a close association with two other national
revolutionary groupuscules, Les Cercles Résistance and Jeune Résistance, all three
resolved ‘to continue the struggle against the canaille of the extreme left’.
35
GUD had
started out in the 1960s as a violently anti-Left student group close to the National
Front youth movement, but, a child of the times, in the early 1980s it started
absorbing the influence of the French New Right. By the late 1990s it had taken on
board Third Positionist perspectives (themselves influenced by the New Right) and
adopt policies far removed from the official Lepenist position on the ‘new world
order’. Yet GUD’s anti-communism has till recently never been of the variety
embodied in the two Resistance groups, which is closely akin to the national
Bolshevism of the AG and the NBP.
36
The two Russian groups, AG and NBP, in their
turn illustrate how easily, in the new globalized and groupuscularized extreme right,
critiques of hegemonic values can be imported and re-exported, making hard and fast
taxonomic analysis even more impossible. In their case Third Positionist and New
Right critiques of the global system imported from Europe were synthesized both with
ultra-nationalism with extreme left-wing critiques of capitalist imperialism in a way
22
typical of post-Soviet political culture. By the late 1990s this new synthesis had
resulted in a perceptible influence upon different Western ‘Third Positionist’
groupuscules that now increasingly display features of ‘national Bolshevism’.
Examples are the British NRF (that has done much to make Arctogaia known to its
Web-readers), National Anarchy, and Spartacus Press, segments of which seem to be
evolving towards a complex synthesis between classic fascism, Third Positionism,
neo-anarchism and new types of anti-systemic politics born of the anti-globalization
movement.
37
Work in progress: the salient features of the groupuscular right
If the attempts to define ‘classic’ fascism have collectively consumed countless hours
of scholarly effort, it is hardly surprising if this article indicates that its ‘post-fascist’
manifestation, ‘the groupuscular right’, resists water-tight taxonomic description and
classification. This is a constantly growing, mutating, shifting counter-culture, more
like sand-dunes than hills. The tentative exercise in conceptualizing the phenomenon
undertaken here, no matter how much the make-shift ideal type that has resulted
undergoes subsequent revision, will have served its purpose if it has at least carved
out a space within the political scientific imagination of some of its readers to
accommodate a new type of idealizing abstraction. Its practical effect would be to
enable them to visualize the minuscule, highly specialized and individualized
grouplets that constitute so much of the contemporary extreme right as collectively
forming a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Hopefully, as case-studies in its
myriad specific variants accumulate, its definitional contours will become less fuzzy
and its eliminable, adjacent and peripheral aspects will come into clearer focus. In the
meantime, it is already possible to suggest several features of the phenomenon which
23
are of significance for a better understanding of the contemporary extreme right and
which merit further investigation.
First, we have seen that the groupuscule largely defines itself by its
renunciation of any bid to create a mass public following, appeal to a wide electoral
constituency, or to enter into alliances or compromises with agencies operating in
conventional political space in the pursuit of maximum influence or operational
effectiveness. By focusing exclusively on the political education and mobilization of a
self-appointed cadre it has become the principal locus in the post-war Westernized
world for variants of revolutionary forms of nationalism (e.g. Universal Nazism) or
new hybrids of ‘radical religious’ with secular white supremacist (e.g. Christian
Identity) and even extreme leftist (e.g. the more national Bolshevik variants of Third
Positionism) critiques of the existing world order uncompromised by considerations
of populist appeal, political correctness, electability, or ‘image’. As a result it is free
to express its vision of the world with the uneuphemized sense of persecution,
conspiracy and megalomania typical of what has been called ‘the paranoid style of
politics’. It is the groupuscular right, therefore, rather than any contemporary
‘modernized’ neo-fascist (e.g. the British National Party) or neo-populist (e.g. the
Front National) party, that has become the reservoir of species of revolutionary ultra-
nationalism, of fanatical obsessions with decadence and rebirth, and of longings for a
new dawn more akin to those that animated the most intransigent Fascists, Nazis,
Falangists, and Legionaries of the Archangel Michael and their comrades in other
fascist movements two generations ago than to any variety of neo-populism. It is on
their Websites that researchers can find abundant evidence that the strains of
palingenetic ultra-nationalism which animated the ‘age of fascism’ in inter-war
Europe have not died out but, but, freed from the role of providing the ecumenical
24
lingua franca of mass movements, have actually diversified. (The sheer abundance of
varieties of fascism now on offer should not be allowed to disguise just how far since
1945 the revolutionary right has, in terms of total volume of ideological energy and
populist support, shrunk to Lilliputian proportions in comparison with the Gulliver of
actual existing liberal democracy.)
Second, the contemporary groupuscule’s ideological radicalism bestows a
particular significance on its extensive use of the Internet to publicise its principles to
its members and forge links with kindred spirits elsewhere. Namely, it allows the
creation of a ‘virtual community’ of activists who are convinced they have been
chosen to keep the flame of truth about the present world order burning despite the
dominant ideology which they have to endure it as long as the dark age of this
‘interregnum’ lasts. This virtual community can avoid any sort of ‘reality check’,
cocooning its members against contacts with the outside world that might open them
up to a more relativized and pluralistic understanding of contemporary history. In
particular, by sparing extremists the need to debate with opponents or lecture to small
gatherings of the faithful,
38
groupuscularity preserves the palingenetic mindset of the
ultra-nationalist right in all its pristine extremism. It thus enables its protagonists to
indulge in an utterly illusory sense of the potential of the extreme right for realizing
utopias of alternative world orders, restored national cultural ‘rootedness’ greatness,
or redeemed racial strength. These utopias are no longer tailored to a world dominated
as they were in inter-war Europe, by the threat of the collapse of Christian civilization
and its strange bed-fellow capitalism, of the spread of Soviet Communism, and of
annihilating wars between European nation-states. Instead they are shaped by fears of
cultural homogenization, mass migration, and planetary ecological break-down.
39
At
the same time the rhizomic structure forced on the extreme right by external
25
conditions means that, paradoxically enough, it has actually achieved an
invulnerability to the attempts by democracies to destroy it which smacks more of the
shadowy world of a James Bond villain rather than the political reality conveyed by
most current affairs programmes. It has grown a cellular, centreless, and leaderless
network with ill-defined boundaries and no formal hierarchy or internal organizational
structure to give it a unified intelligence. The revolutionary right no longer plays into
the hands of security and intelligence organizations by emulating a single living
organism, as slime mould is so mysteriously capable of doing. Instead, following an
internal dynamic which only the most advanced life sciences can model with any
clarity, the minute bursts of spontaneous creativity which produce and maintain
individual groupuscules constitute nodal points in a force-field or web of radical
political energy which fuels the vitality and viability of the organism as a whole.
These qualities duplicate the very features of the Internet which first attracted US
military strategists to its potential for making it impossible to shut down or wipe out
the information it contains simply by knocking out any one part of it, since there is no
‘mission control’ to destroy. The groupuscularity of the contemporary extreme right
makes it eminently able to survive and grow even if some of the individual
organizations which constitute it are banned and their Websites closed down.
Such observations take on a particular resonance in the context of the post-
Twin-Towers world order. Like the palingenetic extreme right, the basis of a ‘terrorist
net-work’ such as al-Qaeda lies in a particular mindset, a radical vision of the current
world order, an intense, though geographically highly dispersed force-field of cultural
and political energy, rather than in any rigid organizational structure familiar to
theorists of corporate line-management models. What prevents al-Qaeda from
achieving total groupuscularity at present is that there still seems to be a hierarchical
26
command structure of sorts in which Bin Laden has clearly played an important role
to date even if some of his declarations and orders may prove to have been
disseminated posthumously. It is a structure that permits the movement to survive by
ensuring that its ‘base’ or the ‘foundation’ (the meaning of al-Qaeda) is not locatable
in any particular country, cell, or individual, something made eminently feasible by
the very globalization it is determined to defend Islam against. If it turns out that al-
Qaeda can continue to represent a threat to Western democracies even if US Special
Forces succeed (or have already succeeded) in turning Bin Laden into a martyr rather
than a flesh and blood leader, then it will be almost certainly because of its rhizomic
structure.
Third, though the highly variegated utopian schemes of the groupuscular right
will never be realized, it is important not to underestimate its role in ensuring that a
subculture of revolutionary extremism has been woven into the weft of every
Westernized society which breeds ‘racially motivated crimes’ and normalizes acts of
violence against the alleged enemies of the ideal order. By providing readily
accessible visions of the need to regenerate the present world system, it can have a
formative impact on the ideological evolution and political careers of particular
individuals in search of grand narratives and total truths by transforming ill-defined
resentments and hatreds into a personal sense of higher mission to ‘do something
about it’. In extreme cases the groupuscule has made decisive contributions to turning
disaffected losers into fanatical ‘lone wolves’ ready to carry out ruthless acts of
terrorism directed against symbols of society’s decadence, whatever the cost in human
life.
One of the earliest such acts of terrorism on record was the Oktoberfest
bombing of 1980 commited by Gundolf Kohler. Though it was initially attributed to a
27
‘nutter’ working independently of the organized right, it later turned out that he had
been a member of the West German groupuscule Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. The
‘Oklahoma bomber’, Timothy McVeigh, had been deeply influenced by the USA’s
thriving groupuscular right subculture. In particular, his disaffection with the
contemporary state of the nation had been politicized by his exposure to the particular
revolutionary subculture created by the patriotic militias, rifle clubs, and survivalists,
and his sense of personal mission to do something to break ZOG’s stranglehold on
America had been crystallized on reading The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, head
of the National Alliance.
40
The London nail-bomber David Copeland, though the
police initially stated he had no connections with any organized right-wing, proved to
have been heavily influenced by Christian Identity and the UK based National
Socialist Movement as well as The Turner Diaries.
41
In his case the Internet played a
crucial role in his recruitment into the private militia of lone terrorists dedicated to
bringing about a radical change to the system. It also provided him with the
information he needed to make nail-bombs. The most recent example of this
phenomenon to hit the headlines is the attempt by Maxime Brunerie to assassinate
Jacques Chirac on 14 July (Bastille Day) 2002. Among the groupuscules that had
influenced him were GUD, the ‘Universal Nazi’ Parti Nationaliste Français et
Européen, and more recently Christian Bouchet’s Unité Radicale (UR) which allied
the latest incarnation of GUD with the Third Positionist and more national Bolshevik-
oriented Nouvelle Résistance.
42
The cases of Kohler, McVeigh, Copeland, and Brunerie suggest that, apart
from any phenomenological secrets and conceptual delights that probing the mysteries
of the groupuscular right may reserve for the more esoterically inclined political
theorists, it is also of considerable practical importance for the custodians of
28
democracy. Its lurking, ghostly presence within the social and political subculture
assures a permanent and constantly refreshed reservoir of anti-systemic diagnoses of
the current local, national, and global situation only a mouse-away from the restless
fingers of those dissatisfied with the current Matrix of reality — within hours of the
Twin Towers attack groupuscular Websites were giving their own spins on what had
happened. As such it provides practically invisible support for the efforts of more high
profile and less media-shy protagonists of new ideological syntheses that promise to
save the West from terminal decay, notably those intellectuals of the European New
Right and the more sophisticated and radical ideologues of neo-populism.
There should thus be no surprise if there is evidence of interaction between the
groupuscular right and the New Right, as the cases of GUD and AG demonstrate.
43
Moreover, the membrane between the groupuscular right’s uncivic society and
orthodox party-politics can at times be highly permeable. The transformation of
Italy’s utterly ghettoized MSI into the highly electable Alleanza Nazionale was
prepared for by intensive groupuscular activity on the fringe of the main party which
injected it with ideas taken from the ‘French’ and home-grown Evolan ‘new right’,
while the case of Aleksandr Dugin, shows that it is even possible for a groupuscule to
exert some direct influence on government circles and hence on official policy
making.
44
This is an age where there is growing public concern about the erosion of
identity and where anti-globalization seems, paradoxically enough, set to become a
genuinely mass populist force the world over. It is thus surely not too far-fetched to
imagine that the presence of numerous extreme right-wing rhizomes preaching
cacophonic creeds of cultural purity and primordial roots (whether racial, proto-
European, or Atlantean), or attacking the decadence of the existing global system and
the calling for a new order may have a perceptible, if largely ‘occulted’ (but not
29
occult) impact on the system. Their combined effect to act as a pervasive ‘dark
matter’ latent within the liberal-capitalist cosmos could help ensure that the centre of
gravity of western democracies stays firmly on the right, an invisible counterweight to
visions of a shared humanity and social justice for all.
Finally, September 11 has made it patently clear that the main challenges to
the social peace and political stability of Western societies in future may come not
from a new Hitler or a new NSDAP, but from types of ‘fundamentalism’, whether
secular or religious, which have assumed rhizomic forms that defy conventional
analysis and military solutions. In this case the groupuscular right could come to be
looked on in future studies of extremism, not as the inconsequential after-life of
classical fascism, but rather more as the intangible, diaphanous shape of extremist
things to come in the age of high modernity. By then it would be part of academic
common sense to treat at least some the units of political extremism which compose it
as well ‘worth mentioning’, no matter how tiny.
Roger Griffin is professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University and the
author of numerous articles and chapters on the theory and practice of generic fascism
in its inter-war and post-war manifestations. His books on the subject are the
monograph The Nature of Fascism (1991), and three documentary readers Fascism
(1995) International Fascism (1998), and Fascism in the Routledge Critical Concepts
series (2004). He is at present working on the relationship between modernity,
modernism and fascism.
10,686 words including endnotes
30
NOTES
1
Roger Griffin would like to thank Jeffrey Bale, Kevin Coogan, Markus
Mathyl, and Martin Durham for their helpful comments on the draft of this
article. Of course, I must take responsibility for its conceptual framework, for
the main thrust of its argument, and for any factual errors it contains (which I
invite readers to communicate to rdgriffin@brookes.ac.uk).
2
E.g. Cioran Ó’Maoláin, The Radical Right: A World Directory (London:
Longman, 1987), J. Algazy, La Tentation néo-fasciste en France 1944-1965,
(Paris: Fayard, 1984); Franco Ferraresi, La destra radicale (Milan: Feltrinelli,
1984).
3
Martin Blinkhorn, Fascism and the Right in Europe, 1919-1945 (Harlow:
Pearson, 2000), 112.
4
The first special issue was vol. 36, no. 3, July 2002, which published articles
on the European Liberation Front (ELF), Nouvelle Résistance (NR), the
National Alliance (NA), the National-Bolshevik Party (NBP), and Arctogaia
(AG). The next special issue, is planned for vol. 37 (nos. 3 or 4) in 2003 and to
contain articles on the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), White Aryan
Resistance (WAR), the Heritage Front (HF), the Aktionsbüro Norddeutschland
(ABND), and possibly the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) and Nordic
Reich Party (NRP) as well. My study of Groupe Union Défense (GUD), ‘Net
gains and GUD reactions: patterns of prejudice in a neo-fascist groupuscule’,
was published in vol. 33, no 2, April 1999.
5
I should stress at this point that this article is by no means making the claim
that groupuscularity is a property exclusive to the post-war extreme right.
Indeed, I hope that the argument that unfolds here opens up some fruitful new
avenues of research into the phenomenon of ‘groupuscularity’ as a latent or
actual quality or of all counter-cultural idioms of anti-systemic thought and
activism in the modern age, especially when they are unable to form the
nucleus of significant populist movements. (The question of pre-modern
groupuscularity is a very complex issue that need not concern us here). The
fin-de-siècle revolt against positivism and decadence created its own pockets
of groupuscularity, as did socialism in a number of capitalist countries.
However, the exponential growth in global communications and
cultural production since the Second World War, the rise of English as an
international lingua franca, and the inexorable spread of the Internet has
considerably expanded the potential of groupuscules to develop what will be
called in this article rhizomic qualities and thus acquire the properties of a
supranational metapolitical ‘superorganism’. Just to take one aspect of this
process, the mesh of linkages and mutual awareness between extremist groups
in different cultures and political contexts militates against the persistence of
narrowly nationalist preoccupations with decadence and rebirth, and also
against accommodating their revolutionary programmes within a national
party-political movement. To this extent the rhizomic groupuscular right is a
pre-eminently post-war phenomenon.
31
This is not to deny that extreme right-wing groupuscules existed before
1945 (as indicated below, the pre-Hitler DAP is a good candidate for
possessing groupuscular rather than party-political properties in its infancy).
However I would suggest that they, or the collective entity they formed, were
subordinate to the mass-based paramilitary political party as vehicle of
political change and in any case lacked fully developed rhizomic properties.
Finally it should be stressed that since the Second World War the extreme Left
and other extremist movements, such as Islamic political extremism have also
developed elements of groupuscularity, and, thanks to modern technology,
‘rhizomicity’. It would be fascinating to learn from students of communism,
revolutionary socialism, and politicized religions who are sympathetic to the
approach outlined in this article how far the ‘groupuscular left’ can be treated
as the equivalent of the ‘groupuscular right’ and how far groupuscularity is a
feature of so-called ‘religious fundamentalism’.
The tradition of supranational centralized authority and hierarchy in
both orthodox Marxism and in orthodox Islam would seem to preclude this.
Nevertheless, research using the concept of ‘rhizomic groupuscularity’ as a
heuristic framework may cast a new light on such issues as the relationship of
such groups as the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Progressive Labor Party to
official Communist parties. It could also illuminate the role played by some of
their more activist branches and cells in keeping the tradition of revolutionary
socialism alive in a democratic era in which the hegemony of capitalism seems
unassailable. It certainly promises to produce fresh insights into the power of
the al-Qaeda network and its resistance to conventional terrorist counter-
measures.
6
It should be emphasized that this article is not implying that all groupuscules
are equally worth the considerable academic time needed to disclose their
microscopic mysteries. As Jeffrey Bale put it in his comment on the draft of
this article: ‘Only those which are ideological or cultural innovators, those
whose members later attain significant political influence, those which
covertly collaborate with state agencies or the security forces, or those that are
willing and able to engage in terrorist violence stand out among the masses of
small groups of dreamers, wishful thinkers, misfits, and fantasists who never
develop any original ideas or take any real action, i.e., the innumerable
specialists in “direct inaction”. All groupuscules should probably appear
somewhere on our radar screens, but not all of them deserve lots of attention.
Some are extraordinarily irrelevant, even by groupuscular standards.’
8
In my introductory essay to the special issue of July 2002, ‘The incredible
shrinking ism: the survival of fascism in the post-fascist era’, I also stressed
the relevance of Arthur Koestler’s concept of the ‘holon’ for expressing this
ambivalent property (see A. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (Hutchinson
& Co, London, 1967).
9
There are, however, occasions when groupuscules may choose tactically to
operate as factions of broader coalitions of right-wing forces, as Jeffrey Bale’s
article on NR makes clear (though his use of the term ‘faction’ may somewhat
blur the distinction I am making here).
32
10
It should be pointed out that the New Right as an international assault on the
hegemony of liberal and ‘Western’ values displays features of groupuscularity
when considered as a single entity made up of individual, nationally oriented
‘New Rights’.
11
See Roger Griffin, ‘Fascism’ in Brenda Brasher (ed) Encyclopedia of
Fundamentalism in the Berkshire Reference Works series (Routledge, New
York, 2001)
12
Steve Silver, ‘Blood and Honour 1987-1992’, in Nick Lowles and Steve
Silver (eds) White Noise, (London: Searchlight, 1998), 13. See also Michael
Moynihan & Didrik Søderlind, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the
Satanic Metal Underground (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1998); John M. Cotter,
‘Sounds of Hate: White Power Rock and Roll and the Neo-Nazi Skinhead
Subculture’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 1999),
pp. 111-140.
13
Ami Pedahzur and Leonard Weinberg, ‘Modern European Democracies and
Its Enemies: The Threat of the Extreme Right’, Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001, 52-72; Andreas Umland, ‘Towards an
Uncivil Society?: Contextualizing the Decline of Post-Soviet Russian
Extremely Right-Wing Parties’, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Working Paper Series, No. 02-03, 2002, available at (as of 30/08/02):
www.wcfia.harvard.edu/papers/555__Toward_An_Uncivil_Society.pdf
14
Sheri Berman, ‘Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic’,
World Politics, vol. 49, no. 3, 1997.
15
Cf. G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard
Fertig, 1975).
16
The French operate two different terms, ‘mouvement’ and ‘mouvance’, the
latter referring to what I call here have called a ‘monocratic’ movement.
However ‘mouvement’ is commonly used for both polycratic and monocratic
ones, so that they cannot be adopted here without generating even more
confusion.
17
On the ‘rhizome’ see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), or the web articles (as of 30/08/02)
www.socio.demon.co.uk/rhizome.html and
http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/deleuzeguattarionary/r/r.html
18
Quoted in taken from the web article on the rhizome: (as of 30/08/02):
http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/deleuzeguattarionary/r/pages/rhizomic.html (viewed
30 August 2002). For a very sophisticated Web article that goes into the theory
of the rhizome see Stephan Wray, 'Rhizomes, Nomads, and Resistant Internet
Use', at http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/RhizNom.html (viewed 14
November 2002). In addition to explicating the concept 'rhizome' with rare
33
sophistication, Wray shows how both Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous
Zones and the Zapatista National Liberation Army utilize the rhizomatic
structure in their struggle to overthrow the 'system' The reaction by a
The comment by a leading Third Positionist ideologue toon the rhizomic concept
appears to corroborate its appositeness. He was in particular struck by to the reference
to ‘multiple starts’, commenting (in e-mail correspondence of 1 September 2002):
‘This has been the strategy of [his groupuscule]: To reinvent and regenerate itself. Not
in order to postpone some form of stagnation, but as part of an organic chain of
development. It’s as though we have planted various other seeds from the main plant.
Putting one’s eggs into several baskets, of course, also multiplies the options of
development and success. We can also attract a more diverse array of individuals.’
19
Michael Freeden, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, The Journal
of Political Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2, 1994.
20
See Roger Griffin, ‘The Primacy of Culture. The Current Growth (or
Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies’, The Journal of
Contemporary History, vol. 37, no. 1, 2002.
21
‘Slime mould (myxomycota) is one of a group of single- to multi-celled
organisms traditionally classified as fungi but having characteristics of both
plants and animals. They reproduce by spores, but their cells can move like an
amoeba and they feed by taking in particles of food. Some types of slime
mould are the bane of gardeners, forming a jelly-like surface on grass.’
Source: http://www.nifg.org.uk/facts_a.htm on 3/9/02, which also reports on
an experiment in which slime mould successfully negotiated a maze to obtain
food.
22
It should be noted that Ernst Nolte concludes Three Faces of Fascism
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1965), 454 with the assertion that only
when total harmony and emancipation have been achieved within human
society will it have crossed into the ‘post-fascist age’. This concedes the
phenomenon some sort of after-life, though I would argue that the
groupuscular right represents a far more vigorous form of survival than he
envisaged when making this observation.
23
See Roger Griffin, ‘The Post-fascism of the Alleanza nazionale: A Case-study
in Ideological Morphology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2,
1996.
24
See Roger Griffin, ‘Interregnum or endgame? Radical Right Thought in the
APost-fascist@ Era’, The Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 5, no. 2, July
2000, 163-178; republished in Michael Freeden (ed.) Reassessing Political
Ideologies, (London: Routledge, 2001).
25
It should be noted, however, that the term ‘Third Position’ dates from the
period of the Cold War when more supra-nationally inclined revolutionary
nationalists aspired to created a ‘united Europe’ which would collaborate with
‘anti-imperialist’ Third World movements in the struggle against the two
34
superpower blocs, one capitalist, the other communist. A glimpse into the
rampant syncretism which is characteristic of the more ideologically
adventurous groupuscular right in areas devoted to transcending the left-right
divide and appropriating iconic figures from the far left can be gleaned from
the following excerpt of fascinating ‘low-down’ on this subject. It is taken
from the extreme, and evidently stubbornly unreconstructed, revolutionary
left-wing website at http://www.huahuacoyotl.com/march.html (at 30/08/02)
which provides the caveat lector: [CLASS WARNING: The following website
may contain language, ideas or suggestions offensive to bosses and capitalists.
Bourgeois sentiment may be bruised by its contents, so members of the ruling
class and their lackeys are advised to fuck off and die now.]
‘The 1960s witnessed the rise not only of the New Left, but also of a new right
that included a neo-fascist resurgence. And it’s fascism’s oddly syncretistic
capacity that’s proving most troublesome this time around. There’s been a
revival of left-wing Nazism based on the National Bolsheviks and the Strasser
brothers. Leftist icons like Che Guevara and Subcommander Marcos have
entered the pantheon of neo-fascists who fancy themselves national
revolutionaries, and there’s been a serious attempt to propagate a Nazi
Maoism based on the “fascist dictatorship of the proletariat”. There’s support
among modern day fascists for the Irish Republican Army, the Red Army
Fraction, Qathafi's Libya and “the Palestinian peoples struggle against
Zionism”. This fascist solidarity with Third World national liberation struggles
— in particular if they’re racially, ethnically or religiously based — is
counterpointed by fascist support for domestic racial separatists like Farrakan's
Nation of Islam in terms of “self-determination for all people”, including
white folk of course. Even the economic distributism of fascist Third
Positionists is borrowed lock-stock-and-barrel from guild socialism. Then,
there’s national anarchism, perhaps the strangest oxymoron so far. National
anarchism draws its fascism from the right in Stirner’s individualist
anarchism, Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism, Jünger’s revolutionary
conservatism and Evola’s elitist traditionalism; from the left in Bakunin's
clandestine insurrectionism, Kropotkin’s propaganda by the deed, Sorel's
mythic violence and Proudhon’s syndical mutualism; and from the terrorist
fringe in Nechayev’s conspiratorial nihilism and Kaczynski’s anti-industrial
Luddism.’
26
See Griffin, ‘Interregnum or endgame’, op.cit.
27
See Umland, ‘Towards an Uncivil Society?’, op.cit.
28
Troy Southgate, ‘Transcending the Beyond: From Third Position to
National-Anarchism’, Pravda (Web newspaper) issue 17/01/2002 at (as of
30/08/02) http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/01/17/25828.html
29
Significantly, Troy Southgate’s reaction to the allegation in my original draft
that his article expressed a ‘utopian vision’ was that he sees ‘National-
Anarchism as a pragmatic answer to the impending collapse of Western
civilisation. In other words, it’s not a head-in-the-sand or escapist idea, but a
35
way of coping with what we see as an inevitability.’ (Private e-mail
correspondence of 31 August 2002/08/02).
30
For a study of the groupuscular world in which black terrorists operated from
the 1960s to the 1980s see Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and
Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana
University Press, 1989); Franco Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia,
(Feltrinelli, Milan, 1995); published in English as Threats to Democracy
(Princeton, Princeton University, 1996); Jeffrey Bale, The Secret Cold War
and European Right-Wing Terrorism, forthcoming).
31
See Markus Mathyl, ‘The National-Bolshevik party and Arctogaia: two neo-
fascist groupuscules in the post-Soviet political space’, Patterns of Prejudice,
vol. 36, no. 3, July 2002, p. 66.
32
Though I stress that groupuscules did not attempt to become populist mass
movements, some are more intent than others on wooing public support
through the use of propaganda and publicity, and in some cases there is a
tension between their nature as a cadre grouping and their urge to convert as
many to the ‘right’ diagnosis as possible.
33
Jeffrey Bale highlights this complex, Janus-faced combination of anti-state
terrorism and covert state-sponsored terrorism in his entry ‘Right-Wing
Terrorism’ in Europe since 1945: An Encyclopedia, edited by Bernard A.
Cook (New York: Garland, 2001).
34
See Robin Ramsay, Conspiracy Theories (London: Trafalgar Square, 2000)
35
The FP Website was to be found at http://www.unite-radicale.com/fp.htm (as
of 25/02/02)
36
See Griffin, ‘Net Gains and GUD Reactions’, op.cit.
37
See Southgate, ‘Transcending the Beyond’, op.cit. For some idea of the
complex ideological web woven by the modern groupuscular use of the
Internet in this zone of the extreme right see the Synthesis Links webpage at
http://www.rosenoire.org/links.php (viewed 30/11/02), which puts the
seeker for metapolitical wisdom with which to transcend the existing ‘system’
in touch with an extraordinary range of sites relating to such topics as
Anarchy, Anthropology, Anti-Zionism, Conspiracy, Environment, Forteana
[sic], Indo-European, Modern "Life", Occulture, Politics, Psychology,
Survivalism, and Tradition.
38
Attempts by the extreme right to rally support in more traditional ways are not
entirely a thing of the past, however. One Third Positionist groupuscule was a
major force behind the holding of the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in
2000, and helped plan three subsequent meetings which were to have involved
public speakers, but were cancelled due to ‘anti-fascist’ threats.
39
Many extreme right groupuscules, though their historical roots lie in inter-war
36
fascism, have transformed the ideology of national rebirth so extensively that
the ineliminable central core of a concern with national decadence and rebirth
is almost unrecognizable. Careful research is thus needed to establish a less
impressionist map of the ideological contours of the contemporary extreme
right than the one offered in this article. One symptom that a residue of
‘original’ fascist thinking lurks even in pan-European or extreme national-
Bolshevik forms of groupuscular ideology is the central concern with cultural
decadence (rather than inequality or social injustice). Another is that when left
fascists (e.g. national-Bolshevik oriented Third Positionists) attack injustice,
whether political, social, or economic, or decry exploitation and imperialism,
they still denounce the principle of egalitarianism and the erosion of cultural
or ethnic identity as sources of the decay of the modern world. A third is the
conception of European rebirth or the Aryans victory over their enemies as
still operating within national or ethnic sub-units (e.g. the USA, France, the
Flemish homeland) that require their unique local identities to be preserved. A
comparison of the Russian, Italian, German, and French dialects of the (non-
ThatcheriteNew Right confirm this pattern.
40
Michael and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist-Timothy McVeigh & the
Tragedy at Oklahoma City, (New York: Avon, 2001).
41
Graeme McLagan and Nick Lowles, Mr Evil. The Secret Life of the Racist
Bomber and Killer David Copeland, (London: John Blake, 2000),
42
Graheme Atkinson, articles ‘Nazi shooter targets Chirac’, ‘the bad boys of
GUD’; Unité Radicale disunited’; Nick Lowles, ‘Would-be assassin tells
world to watch’, Searchlight, no. 326, August 2002, 5-7.
43
A good candidate for groupuscular status is The Scorpion, an occasional
periodical and associated Website dedicated to disseminating a New Right
critique of the existing world order (in this case an incongruous blend of
Nouvelle Droite and Evolan ideas) in English. It is largely edited in Germany
by the former National Front organizer Michael Walker, a further illustration
both of the extreme right’s internationalization and metapoliticization, and of
the way the age of the party has given way to that of the groupuscule in this
sphere of politics.
44
As a further sign of the way groupuscules can penetrate conventional political
space, it is significant that in early 2002 Luc Michel, head of the left-fascist
national-Bolshevik PCN, was invited by a local branch of the former hard-line
Marxist Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS) to address their
conference in Berlin.
