Cult of the archaic

Already it has been a big year for fascists. On Australia Day, a handful of neo-Nazis from across Australia assembled in Sydney. Dwarfed by tens of thousands of protesters at Invasion Day rallies, the fascist stunt still generated the desired confrontation with the state and response from journalists drawn into the spectacle. Two weeks earlier, German investigative journalists published details of a late-2023 meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. At a neo-baroque lakeside hotel, an assortment of old money, political chancers, and neo-fascist intellectuals discussed a proposal for ‘remigration’. Among the retired dentists, bakery franchisers, and parliamentary staffers was Martin Sellner, the one-time, hot-young-Austrian-face of the European identitarian movement – a man so reactionary that even post-Brexit Britain denied him a visa.

In Remigration, a forthcoming book, Sellner fleshes out the masterplan of removing from German-speaking lands those citizens deemed unfit for the national project: ‘the remigration,’ as he puts it, ‘of culturally, economically, politically and religiously unassimilable foreigners’. This ugly euphemism expresses hostility to universal citizenship, perhaps the key continuity between classical and contemporary fascisms, as the Hungarian philosopher G.M. Tamas pointed out more than twenty years ago. Rather than referring to people’s return to the country from which they migrated, as in its sociological usage, this ‘remigration’ included a plan to build a ‘model state’ in northern Africa to receive up to two million deported people.