cults of the culture wars: fringe Far Right theories, to obscurity, and its metabolic rise into the digital age. the Proto-Fascist writers who scavenged from the Left's counterculture years 1960s -1980s. (part 4)

As the 1950s ended, and the hope of a technocratic Utopian vision, based around early Fascist Utopian concepts mixed with 1800s French Utopianism, masked only by the horrors of World War Two, when the allies actually defeated Fascism, at least on the battlefield, failed to materialize, replaced by the rejection of traditionalism, and urbanisation of society with the counterculture years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  The Far Right, as discussed, attempted to rebrand itself into Patriotism and early formations of Neoconservatism, attaching itself to the "Red Scare" of the 50s, and by the mid to late 60s, the Far Right fell into a fringe obscurity to the point of extinction, when three decades that followed was a victory for social democracy, and freedom to live, and express oneself under a more open and egalitarian society.   The proto-Fascists, lay in wait, not out of any tactical retreat, but rather a spiteful disdain for the global counterculture phenomenon.

Charles de Gaulle, a "lite" Fascist, who merged French Solidism, with what global, neoliberal Centralism would like to have aspired too, granted Algeria independence in 1962 essentially displaying close to 800,000 French colonists, who felt betrayed that de Gaulle decided, not for the rights of Algerians living under brutal French colonisation, but out of pure French Ethno-Nationalism, that mostly an Islamic Algeria cannot ever be part of a France, as a white, Catholic nation.   And two years prior, in 1960, a 17 year old Alain de Benoist, who assisted in creating the Far Right "Fédération des Étudiants Nationalistes (FEN)", writing under the pen names "Fabrice Laroche" and "Robert de Herte", pro-colonial and supportive pamphlets in favour of French Algerians, rose to the occasion, when de Gaulle, according to de Benoist, committed treason against France, by granting Algeria independence.  Thus, amidst of the student uprising and turmoil of Paris in the mid to late 1960s, de Benoist gave away his more militant Far Right street activism, to form in 1968, the proto-Fascist 'thinktank' "GRECE:  Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne" (Group for Research and Studies on European Civilisation).  

With the Left, and student inspired Marxist activism spreading across Western Europe, America, Japan and Australia.   De Benoist's "GRECE" with its wordplay on GREECE, seen as a distorted foundation for proto-Fascists as a model for White/European race superiority, was the Far Right's obscure intellectual answer to the events that began on May 1968 when university students rioted, and shut down Paris, protesting against de Gaulle's stifling Nationalism, American corporate interests, and the war in Vietnam.   De Benoist began to intellectualise the Far Right, understanding that the bases to a reactive Left protest, via Marxist, Anarcho activism, are all formed from socialist theories of Class War, anti-Imperialism, anti-State and anti-Capitalism.  For de Benoist, Proto-Fascism must have an intellectual grounding for it to survive, and Fascists, as discussed, are intellectual 'scavengers', to which he, and his contemporaries at the time began to sift through Left literature and its revolutionaries, in an attempt at the ultimate rebrand to reinvigorated proto-Fascism for the late 20th Century, and de Benoist found it in Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a Fascist Prison in 1937.

"Metapolitics":  De Benoist's inversion of Gramsci's "Cultural Hegemony" and the "New Right" as closet Nazis.

De Benoist's "GRECE" and its feigned intellectualism masked as progressive conservative theories, clearly had Far Right even Nazi undertones written all over it, and it wouldn't take a mastermind in political science to be able to decode.  From defending European culture from American capitalism, through to the reinvigorating of European paganism, thus de Benoist saw Christianity as an imported religion from the Middle East, keeping in check to ensure he did relate any anti-Semitism, or Jewish banker conspiracy theories, with his attempt at pillaging Left activist groundwork for building anti-state protest movements, de Benoist's was very much within the realm of the Far Right, with a smattering, beneath his so called intellectual smokescreen, was a conspiracy driven paranoia that an egalitarian and socialist society will destroy a "white" Europe.

And on the 22nd June 1979, the Centre-Left newspaper Le Monde wrote an exposé of GRECE members who had successfully infiltrated Le Figaro Magazine, a weekly conservative publication, calling out de Benoist's cohorts for masking their articles, which were themed critiquing egalitarianism, while praising European 'white' paganism, and subtly or not so, arguing for racial segregation in de Benoist's oddball, reverse racism speak trying to be acceptable, claiming races should stay in each of their countries, and not mix.  A media storm ensured, with persistent fears of 1920s and 1930s Fascism and Nazism, when proponents prior to World War Two used masked dialogue, stolen frameworks from the Left, while infiltrating media, and society to imprint their Fascist ideologies. 

Falling into obscurity throughout the 1980s and 1990s, de Benoist continued to write, and even publish his scavenged, 'Left intellectualism' Nazi laced theories, after being called out by Le Monde in the late 1970s, his redefining of Far Right rhetoric and its dialogue, overlaid by de Benoist's linguistic camouflage was even more comical, with a plethora of reverse meanings, and ecological race based theories, that races have been uprooted from their native lands by American capitalists, and they must return.  Imprinting into "Eco-Fascism", stating that human diversity should be protected as a segregated concept, not as migration, so that traditional peoples are specific tuned to their environment, yes, very Nazi-esque Völkisch, and very dangerous in the decades that followed.

Richard Spencer, "The Alt Right", and the dusting off Alain de Benoist's camouflaged, linguistic framework of Far Right rhetoric for the digital age.

When the so called "Alternative Right" began to lay down the bases for their Trumpist doctrine in 2008 and 2010, Alain de Benoist was indeed dusted off, and lead out of self imposed exile via the creator of the Alt-Right, Richard Spencer, as a key ingredient to reworking Fascism within America, to be more palatable and digestible, ironically, to a younger generation.  And de Benoist had already proven it could be done, just on wordplay alone, while layering in pseudo-intellectualism/science/anthology, and masking the Far Right rhetoric just enough, so that it can be easily seen, if you want to see it, and believe it.  And this is where the danger lies, rebranding in the 2000s digital age, the Far Right intellectual obscure of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to reinforce a justification for extreme violence against egalitarianism.  When the "The Christchurch Shooter" in 2019 murdered 51 people in a Mosque (Christchurch, New Zealand), and the "The Buffalo Shooter" in 2022 murdered 10 African Americans, the source for their motivation for mass killings was the same, a lineage to de Benoist's racist hysteria, and cultural fears of non-white race removing "white" culture, all set within an 'intellectual' justification to kill, to preserve environmental ethnicity, to what de Benoist coined, it all of its literal phrasing, as "Ethnopluralism"  or the "Right to Difference" for the so called 'white race'.  

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(A.Glass 2026)