Esoteric Brezhnevism

The earliest stages of cultural trends often go unrecognized until after the fact, having already receded into history; and such is how Vladimir Jabotinsky, future leader of Revisionist Zionism, recalls a developing sensibility he witnessed taking shape during the period he spent in Italy as a student around the turn of the century. In his 1936 memoir, Story of My Life , he writes:  If my memory has retained signs that already then foretold some psychological change [in the Italian people], they did not yet announce Mussolini, but [F.T.] Marinetti: that literary and philosophical tendency that only several years later went by the name of “futurism” – a tendency whose historical mission consisted perhaps in paving the road for Mussolini’s movement. Among my fellow students I knew already a few who protested with bitter wrath against foreign tourists who insisted that Italy was a museum that contained mere relics of past beauty, a memorial to past glory, and treated ...

Sergei Zubatov (1864-1917) Last week I reviewed Brandon Adamson’s new book The Rats of Nationalism , which discusses the online phenomenon of artificially seeded and deliberately ineffectual splinter tendencies within the dissident sphere, positing the existence of “ another kind of fed” whose objective is the fostering of an innocuously controlled opposition. “Rather than attempt to entice someone into committing an illegal act or disrupt a movement’s image by using extreme, off-putting rhetoric, this type of fed inserts himself into the equation at earlier stages in the radicalization process for the purpose of pacification.” 1 Adamson does not suggest terminology for such agents; but one possibility presents itself in the precedent of the synthetic Russian trade unionism of tsarist police administrator Sergei Zubatov. As a young man, Zubatov had been a radical. Recruited as a police informant, he eventually joined the Okhrana and rose within it to become an important...

"Lived any good books lately?" As a high school outcast with a budding interest in art and literature, I remember feeling a sense of envy in reading about the participants in interwar creative-destructive movements like Dada and Surrealism – or, for that matter, Fascism – for the reason that all of these painters and writers had like-minded contemporaries with whom to collaborate or squabble, whereas nobody else in my school seemed to share my self-ostracizing affinity for vintage nationalisms or was openly willing to acknowledge the faintest racialist sentiment. Retiring into a corner of the school library with a book of European propaganda posters in those days before the explosion of internet politics, I could believe that I was the last of my kind. Then, a few years ago, it occurred to me that, without my realizing it, my historical arts movement moment had found me in the dissident sphere of online nationalism. The creative ferment, the comrades, controversial pe...