From Myths of Victimhood to Fantasies of Violence: How Far-Right Narratives of Imperilment Work

Marcks, Holger; Pawelz, Janina

doi:10.1080/09546553.2020.1788544

Cited by 39 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…Gab functions mainly as a space for a heterogeneous far-right to coalesce as a community of grievance in the face of perceived techno-social persecution by "Big Tech". While victimhood claims have been elsewhere identified as part of a powerful affective bond in white supremacist and broader far-right communities (Berbrier, 2000;Marcks and Pawelz, 2020;Oaten, 2014), we find that alongside "white victimhood," there is a platform-specific sense of persecution underpinning far-right community formation on Gab. Further, in contrast to previous work on far-right virtual communities, which emphasise the importance of offline stigmatization to community formation (De Koster and Houtman, 2008), we find that it is a particularly online sense of stigma which unifies users.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab

Jasser

McSwiney

Pertwee

et al. 2021

New Media & Society

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With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab

Jasser

McSwiney

Pertwee

et al. 2021

New Media & Society

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“…Second, there are similarities between the argumentative structures and approaches of rightwing radicals and conspiracy theorists. Right-wing radicals tend to support their views with presumed scientific knowledge (Lanzke, 2016;Marcks & Pawelz, 2020), which can also be found among conspiracy theorists (Butter, 2020). In addition, right-wing radicals support their arguments by focusing on personal and emotional narratives, feelings, or experiences and exploit topics like child abuse (Lanzke, 2016) in a similar way as conspiracy theorists do (Butter, 2020).…”

Section: Political Attitudes: Right-wing Radicalism As Cause?mentioning

confidence: 79%

Deprived, Radical, Alternatively Informed

Ziegele¹,

Resing²,

Frehmann³

et al. 2022

EJHC

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The Covid-19 pandemic was accompanied by a massive increase of the supply and demand for pandemic-related information. Similarly, conspiracy theories about the origins and functions of the Covid-19 virus flourished during the early stages of the pandemic. The present study draws on a nationally representative sample of the German population aged 18+ (N = 1,207) to investigate factors that are associated with people’s susceptibility to believe in such theories. We draw on research from sociology, political science, and communication to predict that factors related to relative deprivation, political radicalism, and the consumption of alternative news on websites, video platforms, Social Network Sites, and messenger services are associated with an increased belief in Covid-19 conspiracy theories. The data largely supports our assumptions. Additionally, we show that the strength of belief in Covid-19 conspiracy theories is associated with reduced vaccination intentions, which suggests detrimental real-world health consequences of such a belief.

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“…The specifics of the “Covid-19 crisis” propagated by German RPAs was expressed in a cult of violence. This was not only directed at minority groups—specifically, the racialized and gendered Others broadly discussed in the scholarly literature (e.g., Vieten 2020 ; Marcks and Pawelz 2022 )—but also aimed at amplifying the irreconcilable differences between the “native” people versus “antidemocratic” elites. In this way, RPAs stimulated violence toward the center of the civil sphere, expressing it in the aforementioned attacks against governmental authorities, the police and its civil institutions, inter alia , media and research institutes.…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Appropriating the civil sphere: the construction of German collective identity by right-wing populist actors during the Covid-19 pandemic

Zavershinskaia

2023

Am J Cult Sociol

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This paper considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on right-wing populists’ constructions of German collective identity. In their “Covid-19 crisis” narratives, German populists attempted to rearrange the discursive and institutional space of the German civil sphere through a symbolic inversion of the heroic signifier and legitimization of violence against perceived enemies. To analyze such discursive dynamics, this paper utilizes multilayered narrative analysis, drawing on the synthesis of civil sphere theory, the anthropological conceptualization of the relationship between mimetic crisis and symbolic substitution of violence and the sociological narrative theory of the sacralization and desacralization of heroism. This analysis structures the investigation of positive and negative symbolic constructions of German collective identity by German right-wing populist narratives. The analysis shows that although German right-wing populists are politically peripheral, their affective, antagonistic and anti-elite narratives contribute to the semantic erosion of the liberal democratic core of the German civil sphere. This in turn reduces the ability of democratic institutions to control violence and leads to the restriction of civil solidarity.

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From Myths of Victimhood to Fantasies of Violence: How Far-Right Narratives of Imperilment Work

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab

‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab

Deprived, Radical, Alternatively Informed

Appropriating the civil sphere: the construction of German collective identity by right-wing populist actors during the Covid-19 pandemic

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