Bernhard Forchtner

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    What Is the “Great Reset”?

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    Who wouldn’t reveal what is kept out of sight by those who do not have our best interests at heart? Although it is not only the far right that claims to be in the know about sinister plots, they certainly provide a steady stream of such revelations.

    Amongst recent ones, the “great replacement” stands out as an attempt to capture the imagination of the public. According to this ethno-nationalist theory, the “indigenous European—e.g., white—population is being replaced by non-European immigrants.” Yet since the second half of 2020, “the great reset” (TGR) conspiracy theory has been making rounds on the internet too.

    World Economic Forum

    In 2020, the need for a reset was presented by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in terms of reimagining capitalism in a post-pandemic world. As per the WEF, there is an “urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

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    The World Economic Forum brings together high-profile figures from politics and business every year in Davos. So, with the WEF pushing the initiative, it is no surprise that it has become a gift for conspiracy theorists. “Globalists” have been accused of using — or even orchestrating — the COVID-19 pandemic to rebuild and take control of the world economy, with a liberal-cosmopolitan elite executing the next step in a quest to overcome resistance.

    In an article for The Intercept about TGR, Naomi Klein, a Canadian-American writer and activist, talks about the difficulties to critically engage with the WEF project from a progressive perspective. She also points out that the initiative does provide “a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway.” In her typical style, Klein summarizes the plan as encompassing “some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of ‘green’ billionaires readying rockets for Mars.”

    So, while there is ample space for criticism, far-right groups have been working on turning TGR into an umbrella for their political agenda. Globally, readers might have encountered such attempts. In November 2020, a video of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a UN meeting began circulating. In the clip, Trudeau says that the pandemic provided an opportunity for a “reset.” After the video went viral, he stated that thinking about such a reset in terms of a conspiracy theory arises from people “looking for reasons for things that are happening to them … we’re seeing a lot of people fall prey to disinformation.”

    The Far Right

    Against this background, the following briefly summarizes key aspects of TGR as they have circulated among the German-speaking far right. The cover pages of Compact, a German radical-right magazine, and the monthly of the extreme-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) have illustrated the conspiracy theory. An offshoot of the Austrian Identitarian Movement published a webpage, distributed leaflets and organized information booths called “info-zones” about TGR. These examples assert that the conspiracy attempts to put the form of globalization that existed prior to the pandemic on steroids. Rather than limiting globalization, which some claim enabled the worldwide spread of the coronavirus, even more of the same old medicine is being administered.

    Embed from Getty Images

    In an interview with the NPD monthly, Alexander Dugin, the Russian far-right ideologue, says that TGR is both the latest attempt by “globalists” and “the final battle” that is openly totalitarian and characterized by censorship, political repression and homicide. With the exaggerated help of the media, homogenous opinions allegedly rule.

    Various sources use the term Gleichschaltung, the process through which the Nazis established total control over German society, to describe what is unfolding today. Compact magazine claims we are already in 1934 (and not in 1933 when the Nazi Party took the first steps toward Gleichschaltung) as, apparently, the global, totalitarian takeover began last year. Unsurprisingly, the WEF, the European Union and politicians like German Chancellor Angela Merkel are said to be the villains of the story.

    As TGR is supposed to move the public even closer toward a global government, it not only endangers sovereignty and democracy, but also peoples and cultures. That is, conspiracy theorists claim that TGR aims to destroy existing bonds and structures through repeated lockdowns so as to provoke calls for and install a new world order. Or, as Martin Sellner puts it in a video dedicated to TGR, “here, we see one of the basic principles of universalist, globalist, totalitarian ideologues. Also, by the way, a basic principle of the Freemasonry, expressed, entirely free of conspiracy-theoretical wrong tracks: the world has to be built up.”

    Framework

    While such far-right views are hardly news, perhaps the most interesting attack is directed against transhumanism. By merging the digital with the physical world, the ruling elite, according to the Great Reset Stoppen website, enables “total surveillance.” As a result, global dictatorship becomes possible and a once rooted, cultural being is turned into a “socially isolated consumer” slave. Such a person is someone without property and privacy, and one who is not even encouraged to meet and mingle with others face to face. Hence, US tech companies are also on the list of villains.

    None of this is new, but TGR offers a framework for a wide range of far-right ideas, a rhetorical space into which diverse claims can be made. These include the “great replacement” as well as “patriotic” opposition to climate policies and Big Pharma and Big Tech. This time, those in the business of “revealing” sinister plots can even point to what is directly said by the World Economic Forum. Whether TGR will unite the far right’s stories and appeal to wider segments of the public remains to be seen.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Storming of the US Capitol Through Identitarian Eyes

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      As history unfolded before those refreshing their Twitter feeds and watching live TV, attempts to define the storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, immediately emerged, including those by the radical right. Among the various radical-right voices that tried to frame the event, evaluations going beyond, for example, the clownish (though not undangerous) stories of QAnon activists offer insights into the workings of more complex radical-right ideological programs, including glimpses of imagined futures. Following the media-savvy Martin Sellner during a few days of digital activism, from Wednesday, January 6, to Sunday, January 10, illustrates how one of the main proponents of the Identitarian Movement makes sense of and utilizes the insurrection, and highlights the concerns and hopes he connects to the event.

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      Sellner is, of course, a leading figure in the “movement” (and still head of the Austrian branch), contributes to, for example, the main German new-right periodical, is a prolific producer of digital content and a man who, having been in contact with the Christchurch terrorist, has been banned from major social media platforms and now disseminates opinions via Telegram (about 58k subscribers) and BitChute (about 17k subscribers). Sellner began commenting on the event on Telegram in the early evening (CET) of January 6 and, over the next few days, offered discussions with fellow members of the radical right and commentary. (The following quotations are taken from Sellner’s Telegram channel, a column he wrote and various recordings that are available through his BitChute channel).

      Not a Coup

      In a column published the day after the storming that Sellner describes the event not as “a historical, but a hysterical moment,” a “chaotic, planless happening,” an act of “political masturbation and discharge of emotional urges” — not a “coup d’etat,” an “armed uprising” or a “terrorist attack.” This latter part is connected to accusations against the “mainstream press” and its alleged double standard, including in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement (the “Madness of Black Lives Matter”). According to Sellner, the latter aims for the destruction of property and lives, while the events of January 6 were a “mostly peaceful protest.” Indeed, referring explicitly to Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle,” a book he has long drawn on, Sellner regularly speaks of the power of the media to define reality and truth, and the weaponization of the event against “patriots.”

      While such condemnation of the so-called “lying press” is hardly new, Sellner also criticizes the unfolding of the protest itself. Here, he mourns a lack of planning and leadership and, unsurprisingly, calls for an “activism elite” that can channel the idealism of these “patriots.” Referring also to QAnon, he calls for overcoming conspiracy theories that have prevented “patriots” from assessing the situation realistically and taking responsibility in their own hands. Fully in line with his metapolitical orientation, Sellner proclaims that there is no “silver bullet” but a need to fight for hegemony.

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      This points to alternative forms of protest, and he repeatedly raises the idea of a (“symbolic”) “siege.”  That is, Sellner envisages an alternative January 6 that would have not ended in a counterproductive storming of the Capitol, but in a sustained demonstration of strength via a “protest camp” in Washington to influence the political system.

      Celebrating powerful imagery of protesters on the stairs of the Capitol, the course the event took thus appears as a missed opportunity to “awaken the people” and to put the elite in its place. Indeed, one type of victim present in Sellner’s narrativization is a rather broad group of “patriots,” of those who lack a voice, those who are “economically marginalized” and who have no political representation. Ultimately, this covers all those suffering from the establishment, the “disenfranchised, delegitimized people who are not allowed a chance … the indigenous, the Europeans, we are not given a chance, everything is taken away from us, one wants to annihilate us, one wants to destroy us, one wants to, entirely openly with an announced revolution remove us from history.”

      The apparent need to rescue the ethnic collective from an unbound “left-liberal-globalistic ideology” is also visible in another recording as it is this ideology that supposedly results in the “destruction of organically-grown communities, destruction of nation-states.”

      The Old Is Crumbling

      Another type of victim includes particular individuals, from Ashli Babbitt, who was shot during the riot (not forgetting to mention that she was shot by a “black policeman”), to the radical-right activist Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump for being banned from social media. The former president’s future is repeatedly thematized, noting that Trump has seemingly given in (at least in his fight over the election), though acknowledging that this might simply be an act of self-preservation. While Sellner initially speculated that Trump could reveal “dirty background secrets of the globalists” during his last days in office, the imagined threat posed by the enemy is stark: they “really want to completely finish him off … [and beat him] to the rocks like Prometheus: whoever dares to stand up against the globalists will be finished off.”

      Ultimately, he assumes that that revelations are unlikely to happen as Trump loves his life and fortune. As this “total digital annihilation” unfolds, Sellner regularly comments on Big Tech, speaking, for example, of Silicon Valley as the “glowing city of the hill … they are really the masters of the planet, if they want.”

      Such an ending would leave little hope for the radical right, but like every good attempt to forge and mobilize, hope is presented too. Sellner reports of a “civil war” within major tech companies and claims that 2021 could see “vital progress in the area of alt-tech,” the financing of their “own platform,” possibly even their own “fin-tech structure.” This hope goes hand in hand with what he calls a “repression-accelerationism” and the claim that “we have to go through a time of suffering.” With no way back, Sellner calls for a renewed struggle for hegemony and, citing the poet Friedrich Schiller, proclaims early on, “The old is crumbling down — the times are changing — And from the ruins blooms a fairer life.” As these lines are typed, it remains unclear what future will emerge from the storming of the Capitol and, thus, what fairness will blossom.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Star Trek vs. the Radical Right: Visions of a Better World

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      Science fiction has a long history of progressive politics. Probably the best-known example is the Star Trek franchise that started in the 1960s with an Asian helmsman, a navigator from Russia and a black woman as a communications officer and features non-binary and transgender characters in the upcoming third season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” Such politics are not that of the radical right, be they communicated through doctrinaire texts or (science) fiction(s) of a “better world,” the latter being arguably more persuasive due to their emotive nature and a good story’s ability to psychologically transport the reader away from reality and into the world of a hero’s fictive journey.

      An occasion where these two modes meet is Guillaume Faye’s “Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age,” which was originally published in French in 1998. Faye recently featured on these pages, and it is thus sufficient to say that this key thinker of the radical right puts forward a specific argument against egalitarianism and the philosophy of progress.

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      Following an introduction, “Archeofuturism” starts with an assessment of the Nouvelle Droite (the New Right), including criticism of “ethno-cultural relativism” that prevented the affirmation of “the superiority of our own civilization.” This is followed by a chapter on archeofuturism; an “Ideologically Dissident Statements”; Faye’s discussion of a two-tier world economy; a chapter entitled “The Ethnic Question and the European”; and, finally, a short science fiction story to which I now turn.

      The Great Catastrophe

      Concerning archeofuturism, Faye introduces archaism in terms of the unchangeable “values, which are purely biological and human,” meaning separated gender roles, defending organic communities and “explicit and ideologically legitimated inequality” among social statuses, while futurism is described as “the planning of the future,” a “constant feature of the European mindset” that rejects “what is unchangeable.” Hence, “Archeofuturism” celebrates technological advancements such as genetic engineering from a distinctly radical-right ethos.

      Not quite Star Trek’s message, but why bother? Although Faye presents “Archeofuturism” in a classic intellectual style, he also attempts to increase its appeal by fictionalizing his ideas. That is, a story at the end of the book conveys not simply its key points, but an entire, alternative future. This final chapter is not simply dystopian, as is the case with so many radical-right fiction novels, but utopian — not foregrounding decadence and catastrophe, but “the good life” and a happy rebirth of “our folk — whether in Toulouse, Rennes, Milan, Prague, Munich, Antwerp or Moscow.” Thus, the story facilitates emotional identification with a not so distant future, warranting a closer look at this fictionalization of radical-right politics.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The short story is entitled “A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov: A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times” and introduces the reader to Faye’s future through the eyes of the Plenipotentiary Councillor of the Eurosiberian Federation Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov on a day in June 2073. It describes what happened following the “Great Catastrophe,” a convergence of catastrophes central to Faye’s theory that allegedly manifests the end of the “fairytale ideology” of egalitarianism and progress underpinning modernity.

      According to Faye, this is the convergence of seven main crises: a demographic colonization of Europe; an economic and demographic crisis; the chaos in the South; a global economic crisis; the rise of religious fanaticism, primarily Islam; a North-South confrontation; and environmental pollution, which, interestingly, includes an unambiguous acceptance of anthropogenic climate change. Faye assumed this convergence to take place between 2010 and 2020. The story speaks of 2014-16 and tells the reader that, consequently, 2 billion people had died by 2020.

      Readers furthermore learn that following this Great Catastrophe, the Eurosiberian Federation, resulting from the fusion of the European Union and Russia, was founded. Indeed, the idea of a federal Europe is central to Faye’s approach. In contrast to most of his fellow travelers on the radical right, Faye views the contemporary European Union as an insufficient but necessary step toward this federation. Such an imperial block — like India, China, North America, Latin America, the Muslim world, black Africa and peninsular Asia — would be a semi-autarky and an actor on the world stage while simultaneously enabling strengthening of regional identities across the federation.

      Another key element of Faye’s theory, its unrestricted celebration of technoscience, is also present throughout the story. For example, Oblomov speaks of a base on Mars and spends most of the story on a “planetary train” from Brest to Komsomolsk, a journey which takes only about three hours.

      However, within the federation, only 19% cent of the population participate in the technoscientific economy and way of life which “solve[ed] the problems of pollution and energy waste – the planet could finally breathe again. … Still, it was too late to stop global warming, the greenhouse effect and the rise of sea levels caused by wide-scale toxic emissions in the Twentieth century. Science had made rapid progress, but it only affected a minority of the population; the others had reverted to a Medieval form of economy based on agriculture, craftsmanship and farming.”

      Not only is this program manifestly inegalitarian, Faye also simply assumes that the vast majority, in fiction and reality, will enjoy a pre-industrial, neotraditional way of living. Faye’s technoscientific vision includes chimeras and the genetic manipulation of children, the benefits of which will only be available to a minority.

      Extra-European

      Turning to the representation of women, the story introduces three in particular and not untypical ways: Oblomov’s wife, who looks after the children and who only really enters at the end of the story; a virtual female secretary — not “a fat and repulsive old hag” but one who “had perfect measurements, always appeared in scanty dresses and made suggestive remarks from time to time”; and a “dark-skinned and very beautiful girl.” In fact, it is through the conversation between this Indian girl and Oblomov during the train ride that the reader learns much about Faye’s archeofuturist vision.

      Finally, Faye’s vision of the post-catastrophic age includes the cleansing of Europe from its “extra-European” population. In Faye’s writing, Islam is the main enemy and, consequently, the story reports an invasion of Europe by an Islamic army in 2017 that teams up with ‘“ethnic gangs”’ before a Reconquista (with the help of Russia) leads to victory and the deportation of millions of descendants of extra-European immigrants. Unsurprisingly, deportation is driven by archaic criteria as Faye talks about the “right of blood” and the “collective biological unconscious.” 

      A radical-right publisher in Germany recently released the story as a stand-alone book, and the piece is particularly notable due to its direct transformation of theory into science fiction. Indeed, the story is a prime example of how radical-right fictional accounts “imagine the unimaginable” — the transformation toward what the radical right considers a “better world.” Not only fans of Star Trek should take notice of such worlding as the latter can have real-world consequences.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More