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Abstract
Drawing on both the history of emotions and study of radicalised temporalities in fascist cultures, this article defines and explores variants of ‘futural nostalgia’ in British fascist discourses from the 1940s to the present day. It defines ‘futural nostalgia’ as a specific type of nostalgia that is both backward looking and forward focused: it looks to the past to evoke a sense of rooted identity, community and ontological security that underpins myriad critiques of the present day as in crisis; it looks forwards in time to provide a vision of an alternate future based on its idealizations of the past. After conceptualizing this term, it explores forms of postwar British fascism that evoke this trope. Starting with Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement, the article examines variants of futural nostalgia in the emotionology of postwar British fascism, including in the National Front, Blood & Honour, the British Movement, the British National Party and National Action. It concludes by suggesting futural nostalgia is an extreme variant of far-right nostalgia, and further exploration of the phenomenon could help establish family relationships between the fascist and populist far right.
Data statement
Physical data supporting this publication is stored at the Searchlight Archive that is managed by the University of Northampton, and details on how to access this can be found here: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/about-us/services-and-facilities/the-searchlight-archives/. List of archive boxes consulted from this collection are: SCH/01/RES/BRI/13/008; SCH/01/RES/BRI/05/003; SCH/01/RES/BRI/02/022; SCH/01/RES/BRI/03/006; SCH/01/RES/BRI/03/022; SCH/01/RES/BRI/02/009.
Image 1. Image from Britain Awake.
Image 2. Front cover of White Skins White Pride (1988).
Notes
1 Studies of postwar British fascism not cited elsewhere in this article include: Liam Liburd, ‘Turn Again, Fascist Studies: New Perspectives on British Fascism’, 20th Century British History, 32.3 (2021), 462–66; Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson, Cultures of Post-War British Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); John Richardson, British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2017); Nicholas Hillman, ‘“Tell Me Chum, in Case I Got It Wrong. What Was It We Were Fighting during the War?” The Re-Emergence of British Fascism, 1945-58’, Contemporary British History, 15.4 (2001), 1–34; Paul Stocker, Lost Imperium: Far Right Visions of the British Empire, c.1920-1980 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).
2 Recent texts here include: Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); David Renton, Fascism: History and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2020); Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, N.J. ; Princeton University Press, 1994); Walter Laqueur, Fascism Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Second edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
3 For a discussion on the term ‘new consensus’, see: Roger Griffin, ‘Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?’, Fascism, 1.1 (2012), 1–17. For studies that draw on the idea of fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism, see: Roger Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018); Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 2003); Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995).
4 Roger Griffin, ‘Decentering Comparative Fascist Studies’, Fascism, 4.2 (2015), 103–18.
5 Central texts on the methods used in the History of Emotions include: Jan Plamper, History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. by Keith Tribe, First edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
6 See: Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Penguin, 2005), 40 – 2.
7 Mabel Berezin, ‘Political Belonging: Emotion, Nation, and Identity in Fascist Italy’, in State/Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 355–77; Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 44.
8 Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, The American Historical Review, 90.4 (1985), 813–36.
9 George L. Mosse, ‘Introduction: The Genesis of Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1.1 (1966), 14–26.
10 Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism as Political Religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25.2/3 (1990), 229–51.
11 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 35.
12 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 56 – 8; Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time : Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995).
13 Roger Griffin, ‘Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies for Liquid Modernity’, Journal of Modern European History, 13.1 (2015), 5–23.
14 Fernando Espositoand Sven Reichardt, ‘Revolution and Eternity. Introductory Remarks on Fascist Temporalities’, Journal of Modern European History, 13.1 (2015), 24–43.
15 Raul Carstocea, ‘Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the “Terror of History” in the Rhetoric of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania’, Journal of Modern European History. Vol 13 no. 1 (2015), pp. 79–97.
16 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2016). See also Reinhart Kosseleck, Futures Past: On the Semitics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
17 For a website recalling nostalgically the MSI including its use of this slogan, see: https://azimutassociazione.wordpress.com/2015/12/27/quella-nostalgia-dellavvenire-verso-il-settantennio-di-nascita-del-movimento-sociale-italiano/(accessed 23 November 2023).
18 Gregory Maertz, Nostalgia for the Future Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany (Stuttgart, Ibidem Verlag, 2019).
19 Cas Mudde, The Far Right in America, First edition. (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017), 108-110.
20 Anders Hellström, Ov Cristian Norocel and Martin Bak Jørgensen ‘Nostalgia and Hope: Narrative Master Frames Across Contemporary Europe’ in Norocel, Ov Cristian, Anders Hellstrom, and Martin Bak Jorgensen, Nostalgia and Hope: Intersections Between Politics of Culture, Welfare, and Migration in Europe (Springer Nature, 2020), 1 – 15.
21 Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: Analyzing Right-Wing Popular Discourse(Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2013), 186.
22 Hans-Georg Betz, ‘The Emotional Underpinnings of Radical Right Populist Mobilization: Explaining the Protracted Success of Radical Right- Wing Populist Parties’ (2020) available at: http://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Betz_2020_The-emotional-underpinnings-of-radical-right-populist-mobilization_CARR.pdf. See also Hans-Georg Betz and Carol Johnson, ‘Against the Current-Stemming the Tide: The Nostalgic Ideology of the Contemporary Radical Populist Right’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9.3 (2004), 311–27.
23 Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan, ‘Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives, and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era’, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 5.3 (2017), 392–408.
24 Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 169.
25 This literature includes:, Erica G. Hepper, Timothy D Ritchie, Constantine Sedikides, and Tim Wildschut, ‘Odyssey’s End: Lay Conceptions of Nostalgia Reflect Its Original Homeric Meaning’, Emotion 12.1 (2012), 102–19; Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Claire M Hart, Jacob Juhl, et al., ‘The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101.3 (2011), 638–52; Clay Routledge, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jacob Juhl, and Jamie Arndt, ‘The Power of the Past: Nostalgia as a Meaning-Making Resource’, Memory, 20.5 (2012), 452–60; Jacob Juhl, Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt, Constantine Sedikides, and Tim Wildschut, ‘Fighting the Future with the Past: Nostalgia Buffers Existential Threat’, Journal of Research in Personality, 44.3 (2010), 309–14; Clay Routledge, Jacob Juhl, Andrew Abeyta, and Christina Roylance, ‘Using the Past to Promote a Peaceful Future: Nostalgia Proneness Mitigates Existential Threat Induced Nationalistic Self-Sacrifice’, Social Psychology, 45.5 (2014), 339–46.
26 Nicholas J. Kelley, William E. Davis, Jianning Dang, Li Liu, Tim Wildschut, and Constantine Sedikides, ‘Nostalgia Confers Psychological Wellbeing by Increasing Authenticity’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 102 (2022).
27 Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt, Constantine Sedikides, and Tim Wildschut, ‘A Blast from the Past: The Terror Management Function of Nostalgia’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44.1 (2008), 132–40. For an introduction to TMT, see: Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015).
28 Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man (New York: Free Press, 1971), 158.
29 On the role of ‘in-community’ construction in political extremism, see: J. M. Berger, Extremism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
30 Sveltana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2008), for her typology of nostalgia see the introduction.
31 For an exploration of these philosophers and nostalgia, see: Giulia Bovassi, ‘Philosophy and Nostalgia: “Rooting” within the Nostalgic Condition’, in Intimations of Nostalgia (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022), 31–51.
32 For more on interwar British fascism, see: Thomas P. Linehan, British Fascism, 1918-1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
33 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the resurrection of British fascism after 1945 (London: I. B. Taurus, 2015).
34 Joe Mulhall, British Fascism after the Holocaust: From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939-1958 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021) p. 72.
35 Oswald Mosley, The Alternative (Ramsbury: Mosley Publications, 1947), 20 – 1.
36 Mosley, Alternative, 23 – 7.
37 Oswald Mosley, European Socialism (London: Sanctuary Press Ltd., 1965), 4.
38 Oswald Mosley, European Socialism (London: Sanctuary Press Ltd., 1965), 19.
39 Oswald Mosley, ‘What Now? The Choices’, Action no. 106. February 1963, 1–2.
40 Oswald Mosley, ‘MacMillan Betrays our White Civilisation’, Action no. 59 March 1960, p.1 and 4.
41 ‘The Story of the Union Movement (2): The Facts About the Blackshirts’ Action no. 68 January 1961.
42 Ram Rod, ‘Arise’, The Flash, no. 1, 1964, 3.
43 A. White, ‘Racial Suicide’, The Flash, no. 1, 1964,6–8.
44 Britain Awake. The Searchlight Archive, SCH/01/RES/BRI/13/008.
45 Studies of fascist medievalism include: Cord Whitaker, ‘The Problem of Alt-Right Medievalist White Supremacy, and Its Black Medievalist Answer’ in Louie Dean Valencia-García ed., Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Rachel E.Moss, ‘Teaching Medieval Chivalry in an Age of White Supremacy’, New Chaucer Studies, 3.2 (2022); David I Kertzer and Gunnar Mokosch, ‘The Medieval in the Modern: Nazi and Italian Fascist Use of the Ritual Murder Charge’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 33.2 (2019), 177–96. It can also be seen in the work of contemporary figures such as Anders Breivik, see: Mattias Gardell, ‘Crusader Dreams: Oslo 22/7, Islamophobia, and the Quest for a Monocultural Europe’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 26.1 (2014), 129–55.
46 Britain Awake. The Searchlight Archive, SCH/01/RES/BRI/13/008.
47 ‘Editorial’, The National European no. 17, November 1965.
48 Graham Macklin, ‘John Tyndall: In Pursuit of the “Anglo-Saxon Reich”’, in Failed Führers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
49 ‘Thousands Join Our Remembrance Day March of Pride’, National Front News no. 16, December 1978, 4.
50 Fabian Virchow, ‘Performance, Emotion, and Ideology: On the Creation of “Collectives of Emotion” and Worldview in the Contemporary German Far Right’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36.2 (2007), 147–64.
51 ‘St George’s Day March in Stoke-on-Trent’, National Front News no. 57, June 1984, 4.
52 ‘The future belongs to us’, National Front News no. 7, February 1977, 4.
53 Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley, eds., Tomorrow Belongs to Us : The British Far Right since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2018) p. 1.
54 ‘Anger not hatred’, National Front News no. 7, February 1977, 1.
55 John Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour: A Call for British Rebirth (Welling: Albion Press, 1988), 6 – 7.
56 Tyndall, Eleventh Hour, 68.
57 Tyndall, Eleventh Hour, 83.
58 Tyndall, Eleventh Hour, 516.
59 Tyndall, Eleventh Hour, 520.
60 Tyndall, Eleventh Hour, 537.
61 For a detailed history of British white power music and its international networking, see: Ryan Shaffer, Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017).
62 Joe Pearce, ‘Editorial’ Bulldog, no. 14, p. 2.
63 ‘Editorial’, Bulldog no. 38, p.2.
64 White Pride Organisation, White Skins, White Pride, December 1988, 2.
65 White Skins, 21.
66 White Skins, 32.
67 White Skins, 28.
68 Broadsword no. 1, 2.
69 Broadsword no. 6, 1.
70 ‘Shires Awake’ Broadsword no. 1, 5.
71 ‘Editorial’, Broadsword no. 19, 2.
72 ‘The Destruction of England’, Broadsword no. 19, 3.
73 ‘The Last Days of a White World’, Broadsword no. 19, 8.
74 ‘Taking a Second Look at History’ Broadsword no. 19, 8.
75 ‘Our Ancestors’, Broadsword no. 23, 16.
76 Building an N.S. Future’, Broadsword, no. 35 (Autumn/winter 2008),20.
77 For analyses of the British National Party as a specifically fascist political organisation, see: Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Matthew Goodwin, New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).
78 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jreITHdm6NY (accessed 23 November 2023).
79 Available at: http://hnhnorfolk.blogspot.com/2009/12/nick-griffin-begins-battle-for-barking.html (accessed 23 November 2023).
80 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCNjuyNVjdE (accessed 23 November 2023).
81 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytaOXVqfUuU&list=PLZuDg6IHm1emmaPJ7NRCDAL92IkcCijGe&index=7 (accessed 23 November 2023).
82 ‘BNP uses Polish Spitfire in anti-immigration poster’, 4 March 2009, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/4935429/BNP-uses-Polish-Spitfire-in-anti-immigration-poster.html%20 (accessed 23 November 2023); ‘BNP shot down after it uses a POLISH Spitfire to front its anti-immigration campaign’, 4 March 2009, available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1158970/BNP-shot-uses-POLISH-Spitfire-anti-immigration-campaign.html (accessed 23 November 2023).
83 For example, see: E Hagelberg, ‘The Seven Daughters of Eve’, Heredity, 89.1 (2002), 77.
84 Paul Golding, ‘The truth about our national identity’, Identity, issue 9. May 2001, 3.
85 Stephen Oppenheimer, The origins of the British: a genetic detective story: the surprising roots of the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).
86 Nick Griffin, ‘We’ve Always Been Here’, Identity, issue 80, July 2007, 4-7.
87 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘The “Great Replacement”‘(2022), available at: https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Great-Replacement-ISD-External-August2022.pdf (accessed 23 November 2023).
88 Paul Jackson, ‘“White Genocide”: Postwar Fascism and the Ideological Value of Evoking Existential Conflicts’, in The Routledge History of Genocide (Routledge, 2015), pp. 221–40.
89 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘The “Great Reset”‘(2022), available at: https://www.isdglobal.org/explainers/the-great-reset/(accessed 23 November 2023).
90 See: https://www.knightstemplarorder.com/full-knight (accessed 23 November 2023).
91 Matthew Kriner, ‘An Introduction to Militant Accelerationism’ available at: https://www.accresearch.org/shortanalysis/an-introduction-to-militant-accelerationism (accessed 23 November 2023).
92 National Action, Attack (2014), p. 6.
93 Attack, p. 43.
94 Allen, Chris, ‘Proscribing National Action: Considering the Impact of Banning the British Far‐Right Group’, The Political Quarterly (London. 1930), 88.4 (2017), pp. 652–59.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Paul Jackson
Paul Jackson is Professor in the History of Radicalism and Extremism at the University of Northampton. He specializes in the history and contemporary dynamics of fascism and the extreme right, and his most recent book is Pride in Prejudice: Understanding Britain’s Extreme Right (2022). He has engaged widely with the media, including national and international press, as well as for BBC radio and television, and has engaged with a wide range of policymakers, professionals and activists. Email: [email protected]