Neo-Nazi Parties Swiftly Acquiring Power Throughout Europe by Slyly Posing as a “Third Way”

 

Since in much of post-WWII Europe explicit Nazi activity was illegal, many resurgent far-right groups have hidden behind moderate sounding names, and in many cases adapted their rhetoric in order to draw younger generations into the “brown” orbit. It is against this backdrop that in the late 1970s the term “Third Position” (Terza Posizione) emerged in Italy to denote a neofascist or neo-Nazi political position that attempted to blend the irreconcilable ideologies of nationalism and socialism into a “third” position. This was done in order to lure in gullible youth drawn to leftist, progressive, and anti-capitalist ideas, just as Hitler had recognized the popularity of socialist ideas among large parts of the working class, and thus called his movement Nazism, short for “national socialism”—a con job.

In the postwar era, there emerged several variants of Third Positionism that have assumed different names, reaching from Claudio Mutti’s and Franco Freda’s Nazi-Maoism to Alexander Dugin’s version of “neo-Eurasianism,” and current-day Identitarianism.

The ideology of this particular current of “Third Positionist” neofascism and neo-Nazism generally stays within the narrow limits of an inherently völkisch (pagan) and racist worldview, and thus only cosmetically differs from openly and explicitly pro-Nazi substructures replete with swastikas and photographs of Hitler. This “pagan camp” differs from Christian (not pagan) post-war neofascist and neo-Nazi currents, including Christian White supremacists and Catholic integralist groups, but all of the above’s linear antecedents are in the fascist and Nazi parties of the 1930s.  (more...)

Neo-Nazi Parties Swiftly Acquiring Power Throughout Europe by Slyly Posing as a “Third Way”