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By Richard Seymour
Wherever disaster nationalism erupts, it produces a pornography of sexual evil: ‘porno-nationalism’, as Dibyesh Anand calls it. It fantasises about women who are ‘disgusting vile parasites’ (among the milder specimens of incel misogyny), duplicitous Muslims luring Hindu girls into their religion (the Hindu nationalist fear of ‘love jihad’), and elite child sex trafficking ‘across continents, through the Vatican, and underneath the cover of charities and child protective services’ (as a QAnon bestseller put it).
The nation, being reproduced through sex, always recruits sexuality. In its rise during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nationalism helped establish what Christopher Chitty called ‘sexual hegemony’. The sexual norms benefiting the up-and-coming European bourgeoisie became widely accepted through being associated with the national cause. For the new rulers of Europe, George Mosse argues in his history of nationalist sexuality, these norms were restraint, respectability and strict gender segregation. This morality helped contrast bourgeois virtue with aristocratic decadence and the immorality of the lower classes. However, bourgeois respectability also became a civilizing project for society as a whole. Without it, modern life harboured sexual catastrophe: erotic intoxication overthrowing reason, masturbation promoting anti-social behaviour, men becoming women and women becoming men.
Upstart nationalism thus persecuted gay cultures which had existed more convivially in medieval urban societies. Masturbation was deemed dangerously close to conspiracy. Literary works, even of venerated artists like Shakespeare, were expurgated of overt sexual references for safe public consumption. The ideal national body was strictly gendered and expunged of sensuousness. All that was threatening and dangerous in sexual pleasure was ascribed to foreigners and national enemies: immoral ‘dagos’, sensuous ‘Orientals’, Jews who allegedly behaved “Upstart nationalism thus persecuted gay cultures which had existed more convivially in medieval urban societies. Masturbation was deemed dangerously close to conspiracy. Literary works, even of venerated artists like Shakespeare, were expurgated of overt sexual references for safe public consumption. The ideal national body was strictly gendered and expunged of sensuousness. All that was threatening and dangerous in sexual pleasure was ascribed to foreigners and national enemies: immoral ‘dagos’, sensuous ‘Orientals’, Jews who allegedly behaved like women or were uncontrollable in their lust for gentile women, homosexuals who ‘inverted’ proper sex roles.
Fascism’s relationship to respectability was always rather more complicated than Mosse suggests. Dagmar Herzog describes how, far from simply trying to control sexuality, the Third Reich set out consciously to produce a ‘healthy’, ‘Aryan’ version of sexual pleasure. Nazi publications incited excitement, Nazi youth clubs exhorted adolescents to fuck, contraception was abundantly available, men were encouraged to have extramarital affairs and soldiers were urged to ‘carouse’ (as Hitler put it) in brothels. Official Nazi sexuality was, however, sentimental, embryonically ‘New Age’, obsessed with nudism, nature and the healthy organism, in contrast with what the ideology saw as the grotesque, burlesque, artificial, ‘Jewish’ sexuality of the Weimar era.
In the two-step programme of fascism, sexual liberalisation and repression went together. The ideology of German sexual health was underwritten by the laws against Jewish ‘race-defilers’ having relationships with ‘Aryan’ women, campaigns of forced sterilisation and internment, and ultimately extermination of the unwanted or threatening sexual bodies of Jews, gays and the disabled.
Sexual excitement was used as a nationalising force, an incentive to discipline. The brutal logic of it even extended into concentration camps where, at Himmler’s orders and with Hitler’s approval, brothels were arranged for the most productive male camp labourers.
To stop the ‘love jihad’, according to activists, it was necessary to destroy the submissive, secular, anglicised upper crust linked to the Indian National Congress and the ‘left’.
This paranoid, persecutory vision of Muslim sexuality is echoed elsewhere in the idea, popular in European countries, that Muslim men are peculiarly prone to forming rape gangs or paedophile ‘grooming gangs’, and that this is part of a wider assault on the nation and its people. The motif of violated innocence is a consistent aspect of the nationalist cuck fantasy: consider the allegations by Bolsonaro supporters of ‘gay kits’ in Brazilian schools featuring baby bottles with penis-shaped teats, or Germany’s ‘Demo für Alle’ protests against sex education reform recognising LGBT diversity, which the protesters derided as ‘brainwashing’ kids.
In this vein, QAnon inherited a tradition of moral panic about child sex abuse. Long before QAnon’s ‘Save the Children’ cult, or the #pizzagate conspiracy theory that precipitated it, the ‘moral majority’ of the United States bought into a story of Satanic ritual abuse of children that was the collective fantasy of parents, social workers, psychologists, teachers, police and coerced children.
QAnon’s theory of a ‘deep state’ paedophile ring organised by ‘Luciferians and Satan-worshippers’ is linked to anxieties about the growing concentration and remoteness of political power: the non-congruence of nation and state. Even this move, however, was prefigured by mainstream culture, for example in the official and sweeping UK investigations driven by false allegations of elite paedophilia involving leading politicians and celebrities, which were given much hysterical and misleading press coverage, inspiring broad buy-in from left to right before they fell apart.
Since sex is a market governed by zero-sum competition, since women are ‘commodities’, since one man’s satisfaction is another man’s deprivation and since biology is destiny, a growing number of bamboozled young men are destined to be sexually dissatisfied. Worse than that, by naturalising zero-sum competition, incel ideology also naturalises the concomitantly sadistic culture of winners and losers, making sexual failure a more invidious experience. What political opponents see as an expression of ‘privilege’ and ‘entitlement’ is experienced as a fatal deficit in the incel’s being.
Could this be related to why a few Brits scream about the asylum seekers (‘the boat men’) being mostly men?
Consider the phenomenon of Andrew Tate fandom. Tate calls himself a libertarian. He despises what he calls ‘the Matrix’, a regio dissimilitudinus, a simulacral reality produced by the ‘powers that be’ which emasculates virile Western males. ‘I’m not a rapist,’ he once explained, having asserted that he moved to Romania because it would be easier to get away with rape. ‘But I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.’ To his extremely suasible male fans, this was no more than his due: ‘He’s “Top G” – he can rape whoever he wants.
The incel fantasia of limitless enjoyment would have few converts if its picture of reality didn’t resonate with some aspects of real life. For example, the idea of 20 per cent of men ‘having’ 80 per cent of the sex is an exaggeration but not entirely fanciful. The General Social Survey suggests that for both men and women in the United States, it is more like 20 per cent ‘having’ between 50 and 60 per cent of the sex. The picture of rising sexlessness also gets some support from the same source, which finds that the number of people, especially younger people, having no sex at all has risen 28 per cent for men and 8 per cent for women, especially since 2008 – although that data is contested by other sources such as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth.
What is missing in this story, however, is that celibacy among young adults is increasingly voluntary. What is collapsing is not gratification but desire. Not only is sexual activity falling, but so is interest in sex and along with it the whole business of romance and dating. Erectile dysfunction is dramatically on the rise, suggesting a blockage that has nothing to do with the availability of sexual partners. The difficulties and disappointments that always come with sexual relationships appear to be overwhelming the ability to desire. Something about late capitalist civilization and its diminished sociality is just not very sexy: which, for Freud, would have meant that it is not worth living in.
It might, then, be a mistake to take incels at their word when they claim their celibacy is wholly involuntary. On the one hand, their vision of erotic rivalry would be a means for them to arouse themselves, to restore their flagging desire. But it is also difficult not to see, in incel misogyny and the bleakly persecutory vision of sex accompanying it, a form of erotophobia. And just as a ‘cannot’ is often a smokescreen for a ‘will not’, their claim to be unfairly deprived by women may be a convenient way of externalising their own refusal.
Sex is a geopolitical issue, and the cause of the West’s decline, according to disaster nationalism. Much as Pat Robertson blamed abortion, feminists and gays for the attacks on the World Trade Centre, so today’s far right claims that the US defeat in Afghanistan is a condign punishment for having embraced ‘globohomo’: the ‘Globalist-Homosexual Agenda.
The ‘symbolic glue’ holding the disparate parts of the new far right together, says gender studies scholar Andrea Pető, is the struggle against ‘gender ideology’. This is another alleged Marxist-inspired attack on traditional sex roles, inspiring opposition from the Catholic right in Poland to evangelicals in Brazil and uniting traditional militarists, the religious right, the alt-right and neofascists. The ‘deconstruction of the European male’, writes Swedish neofascist Daniel Friberg, is the sharp edge of the ‘Left’s project of destruction’. He excoriates ‘the ridiculous pseudoscience of “gender studies”’ as the latest weapon in this offensive. Following a similar logic, a series of governments, in Hungary, Romania and Brazil, have effectively banned gender studies. The French ‘New Right’ propagandist Guillaume Faye agrees that European societies have been lured by leftist propaganda into ‘sexual confusion’ by removing supposedly traditional prohibitions on ‘homophilia’, ‘inter-ethnic and inter-racial unions’, and ‘legal homosexual unions’: acts tantamount to ‘ethno-masochism’. He blames this for the decline in the European family and, concomitantly, the falling birth rate.
Where ‘gender ideology’ is not identified as a Marxist attack on men, that is only because it is worse than Marxism: ‘even more destructive to man’ than communism, as Polish president Andrzej Duda put it, or even ‘worse than communism and Nazism put together’ according to Polish bishop Tadeusz Pieronek.
The core metaphysical obsession guiding this rightist ferment in the West, the sociologist Chetan Bhatt argues, is a fear of ‘white extinction’ whose resolution is ultimately found in ‘cleansing apocalyptic violence’. It is this preoccupation alone which can yoke together a heterogenous coalition of rightists, secular and religious, traditionalist and modernist, alt-right and neofascist. The obsession with demographics, which took off as an Islamophobic angle during the ‘war on terror’ and was endorsed by such bellicose liberals as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, has now become the rallying cry of fascist killers. Feminisation, low birth rates and Muslim immigration were the stuff of an ongoing ‘genocide’ against white males orchestrated by cultural Marxists, Anders Behring Breivik argued. ‘It’s the birth rates,’ the Christchurch murderer’s ‘manifesto’ insisted. ‘It’s the birth rates. It’s the birth rates.’
Wherever disaster nationalism has gained ground, it has unfailingly found a ‘communist’ enemy to berate. And the less plausible the attribution of communism, the more fervent the anti-communism.
Barack Obama, sovereign of drone strikes, was a ‘socialist’ according to the Tea Party movement. Joe Biden, for whom socialised healthcare is too radical, is a ‘Trojan Horse for socialism’ under the control of ‘wild-eyed Marxists’ according to Trump. Black Lives Matter is a conspiracy of ‘left-wing extremists’ and ‘Antifa’ out to destroy ‘the United States system of government’. The British government has launched its own inquiry into left-wing ‘extremism’ in the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a telling grammatical torsion, he added that they ‘hate our own country’. Graham offered this red-baiting as an alternative to Trump’s racist demand that the squad ‘go back’ to their ‘totally broken and crime-infested’ countries. ‘Aim higher,’ he suggested, as though McCarthyite thuggery were the high road when overt racism was impolitic. In June 2023, Trump promised that, if re-elected, he would ‘destroy the Communists’ in a ‘final battle’ to save America.
In Brazil, a potent legacy of anti-communism beginning with the Vargas dictatorship has been reanimated since 2015. That was the year in which the moderately reformist Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party, having been re-elected to a second term, abruptly pivoted away from her electoral platform and embarked on an unpopular programme of fiscal austerity. This alienated allies, drove her electoral support into single digits and provoked mass unrest. A significant current in the protests, however, was the middle-class right decrying both Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula), as ‘merely communists in disguise’. ‘We do not want a communist Brazil,’ they pleaded. ‘SOS military.’ ‘Brazil does not want and will not be a new Venezuela’. ‘Army, Navy and Air Force. Please save us once again of [sic] communism.’ Rousseff, fatally weakened, was overthrown in a soft coup. Lula was arrested and jailed on corruption charges that later turned out to have been manipulated by judge Sérgio Moro and lead prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol to prevent him from running for president. With Bolsonaro elected in 2018, his jubilant supporters cried, ‘Death to the communists!’ When Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that Lula’s conviction was unsound a pro-Bolsonaro ‘militia’ staged an armed protest and a simulated bombing using fireworks, calling the judges ‘communists’.
In Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Poland, far-right governments claim that even after 1989 communism remained insidiously in power. The judges, professors, journalists, media producers, lawyers, teachers and others responsible for reproducing society in its normal state retained their Soviet-era connections and affinities. Their Marxism had merely morphed into a more subtle and insidious form, promoting cultural liberalism, ‘gender ideology’, LGBT rights, and the ‘Islamization’ of Europe.
Even in the UK a toytown anti-communism was unleashed against Jeremy Corbyn, parliamentary socialist and twice-elected leader of the Labour Party in 2018. According to a flurry of fake allegations, repeated by poker-faced Conservative government ministers, Corbyn was an Eastern Bloc spy. Even when those allegations became too embarrassing to maintain, Corbyn’s opponents couldn’t resist calling him a communist. He led, as former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith expostulated, a ‘Marxist and rather nasty Labour Party’. His promise to deliver free broadband for the country in 2019 was, said the media, ‘broadband communism’. As the British right searches for communist enemies to make its situation more interesting, it has implicated everyone from the most milquetoast purveyors of fluffy woke doxa (‘cultural Marxism’) to the European Union, hardnosed champion of competitive markets (the ‘EUSSR’).
Anti-communist fury, which would at least make more intuitive sense in countries where the residues of historical communism retain some popular traction, like India or the Philippines, has in fact been most fervent in those societies where it is almost entirely absent, such as the United States, Brazil or Hungary.
Anti-communism without communism is hallucinatory, but not entirely new. If previous waves of anti-communism at least responded to real communist uprisings and movements, they scarcely ever engaged with communism as it really existed.
Among French antiparliamentary rightists in the 1920s and 1930s, secularism, female suffrage and reconciliation with Germany were all tantamount to ‘communism’.
Moreover, fabricated communist plots were found everywhere. The Nazis took power on the strength of preventing a fictional communist coup. According to the fascist mobs who attempted to storm France’s parliament on 6 February 1934, the weak, fiscally orthodox, centre-left government of Édouard Daladier threatened a socialist coup. General Getúlio Vargas’s coup establishing the Estado Novo dictatorship in Brazil was justified by an Integralist Party forgery, ‘the Cohen Plan’, which claimed to be a detailed communist plan for insurrection.
Communism was everywhere, and everywhere it was a sexual threat. The Freikorps fretted over promiscuous ‘Red women’, ‘proletarian whores’ with guns concealed under their skirts.
The Cohen Plan, foreseeing communist insurrection, asserted that the excitement of the masses in rebellion would have a ‘distinctly sexual meaning’. Argentinian fascism portrayed communism through the figure of the sexually degenerate yet potent body of ‘the Jew’. During the Cold War, communism was thought indistinguishable from subversive sexuality. ‘If you want to be against McCarthy, boys,’ said Senator Joseph McCarthy, ‘you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.’ ‘You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives,’ said Senator Kenneth Wherry. During the Indonesian anti-communist massacres in 1965, which killed half a million people and placed General Suharto in power, Suharto’s propaganda electrified the public with tales of communist perversion. He warned, Vincent Bevins writes, of ‘the inversion of gender roles, the literal assault on strong men’s reproductive organs carried out by demonic, sexually depraved communist women’.
The image of communism as racial conspiracy had adherents well beyond fascism. As Paul Hanebrink’s authoritative history of anti-communism details, the chief Russia correspondent of the Times blamed the Russian Revolution on the ‘seething mass of Jewish pauperdom’. Winston Churchill blamed communism on the ‘International Jew’ who lacked national loyalties.
Cold War suppression of the civil rights movement began with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Assuming control of the committee, Congressman John Rankin blamed civil rights on ‘the tentacles of this great octopus, communism, which is out to destroy everything’. The ‘Massive Resistance’ movement against civil rights portrayed Martin Luther King and his allies as communists.
When the Tea Party berated Obama’s ‘socialism’, for example, it was tempting to see the red-baiting as just a decorous envelope for vulgar racism: ‘little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have’.
Michael Mann points out that when Nazi militants named their main enemies, 63 per cent identified communists and socialists, compared to 18 per cent who named Jews. Racism reconciled violent anti-communism with the supposed interests of ‘patriotic’ workers. Is the same principle not at work when today’s right-wing nationalists claim to speak up for the ‘white working class’ while opposing almost any policy that would make their lives better?
The social psychologist Joel Kovel once wrote of ‘black-hole anti-communism’.40 In the black hole, everything that is perceived as threatening or dysfunctional is compressed into a single point. All crises, all opponents, are but different tentacles of the one communist kraken.
Herbert Marcuse zoomed in on this trait when he described fascism as a ‘preventive counter-revolution’. In Italy, Germany and Spain, fascism had taken power promising to thwart a communist revolution that was not taking place. What was taking place was a turbulent process of democratisation, urbanisation, class struggle and the disruption of traditional morality and gender relations. The danger lay in the ‘rebellious and unthinking’ masses empowered by such transformations, as General Franco put it in his statement justifying the military uprising against the Spanish Republic in July 1936.
As Aguilera’s words* imply, the sanguinary record of fanatical anti-communism always exceeded any conceivable strategic necessity. In the bloodiest episodes of anti-communist violence, stretching from the crushing of the Paris Commune through early twentieth-century fascism, colonial counterinsurgencies such as the British assault on Malaya, bloody dictatorships in the ‘free world’ such as the Indonesian military coup of 1965, and US proxy wars in Central America, it is rare to find that bodies have not been mutilated, or that children have not been killed in some humiliating fashion or that war has not descended into genocide.
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*Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, Verso, October 2024
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