Far Right-Wing Extremists and Neo-Nazis are Everywhere (but Some are more 'Worthy' than Others)

An essay on propaganda, which appeared in late July and a long podcast with Hügo Krüger are in it for you today

So, today is the first day of the academic year, hence I’m a bit more time-constrained as usual. For you, this means you get directions to something I’ve been doing during the summer break: trying to get what I write here to bigger audiences.

---

Far-Right Extremists and Neo-Nazis are Everywhere (but some are more ‘worthy’ than others)

Reporting by Austrian Legacy Media on Anti-Mandate Protests and Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ Exhibits Striking Levels of Double Standards—and Advances Arguments that Render Some of them Worthier than Others

February 2022 was a crucial turning point in human affairs. For two years, all matters Covid-19 dominated the public sphere, yet within a few days, public health concerns were overtaken by #standwithukraine. True, such seismic shifts in the media landscape, while apparently sudden and virtually hegemonic, do not occur in all contexts at the same time: they may be more appropriately compared to an avalanche or a bout of incipient mass hysteria, by which is meant that often unnoticed events, once ‘critical mass’ is reached, explode onto the scene. This is a fascinating spectacle to observe and analyse, especially given legacy media’s capabilities—cognitively and morally—to turn a proverbial game of chicken into a stampede as the political and journalistic ‘herds of independent minds’ (Harold Rosenbaum) shift gears at a moment’s notice.

The scale and scope of these changes appear sudden to many observers and most casual readers, yet they are not. Ever since Sars-Cov-2 appeared on the world stage, the public was (is) fed an astonishing amount of information of all kinds, yet it is probably no exaggeration that much of it is beset with hypocrisy and false equivalences, in addition to heavy doses of virtue-signalling. This essay is an enquiry into documented cases of far-right extremism in the context of both ‘Covid-19’ and Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. In both cases, the presence of ‘far-right extremists’ is central to the media narratives, yet the analysed articles are trying to make two very different, if not outright contradictory, points.

Using Austrian legacy media of both state and non-state provenance as an example, I will be looking at how accusations of far-right extremism, however far-fetched or contrived, are used to both discredit any protest against Covid mandates while, at the same time, Vladimir Putin’s declared aim of ‘denazification’ of Ukraine is dismissed out of hand by the very same media personalities and institutions.

Each are dealt, in turn, with chronicling the rank hypocrisy that has come to characterise both topics. As such, the following showcases—in a perhaps ironic adaptation of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s considerations—how far-right extremists, including Neo-Nazis, are ‘unworthy’ in one case (protests against Covid mandates) while they are deemed ‘worthy’ in another (Ukraine). The study of how legacy media presents a certain trope (far-right extremism) highlights two concrete examples of media bias that use the same ‘argument’ (the presence of far-right extremists in anti-mandate protests and in Ukraine) in two completely contradictory ways . In exposing the double standards, this study holds up a mirror to the crude stereotypes, employed seemingly at-will as long as they serve a certain narrative, by state and non-state media in a European country in an age of plague and war.

Points of Departures, Sources, and Methods

It is obvious that any large-scale and, above all, sustained shift in across-the-board media coverage is the first tell-tale sign of concerted efforts. For example, when a tsunami hit the Japanese nuclear power station in Fukushima, of course world-wide headlines ensued—but, like the big waves that hit the shore in March of 2011, Western media attention shifted away from the calamity within a few days.

This is decidedly not the case with accusations of far-right extremism, which are frequently used to slander individuals, demonise entire groups, or discredit any argument grounded in pure logic. Known as ‘playing the Nazi card’, the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum was coined by Leo Strauss in 1953 in his Natural Right and History. Tucked away in his lecture on the ‘distinction between facts and values’, Strauss postulated that once one followed any thought to its logical conclusions, it would inevitably arrive at ‘a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler…that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum’. Yet, as Strauss was quick to point out:

A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to be shared by Hitler.

It is noteworthy that Strauss wrote those lines in the immediate aftermath of WW2, and I find it equally telling that this nugget of wisdom has been transplanted into the internet age. Known as ‘Godwin’s Law’, replete with its inescapable Wikipedia entry, its creator, Mike Godwin, maintained that ‘its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust’. Concluding his reflections, Godwin recalled his horror

to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror…our challenge as human beings who live in the period after that inflection point is that we no longer can be passive about history—we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again.

With these preliminaries out of the way, let us now turn to seek answers to the following guiding question: what is the role of far right-wing extremism in current politics and its reflections in mainstream media?

More often than they are not, allegations of far right-wing extremism are tantamount to a strawman argument, by which is meant that guilt by association—presumed, factual, or both—is deployed at-will to discredit any argument or individual. As such, the powers that be in politics and legacy media will (ab)use such allegations in cases where it protects and serves pre-established narratives about any given topic. In other words: accusations of (typically) far right-wing extremism are part and parcel of the political and propagandistic toolkit of those who wield political power and their fellow-travellers in Western mainstream media.

In terms of research approach, three issues should be noted:

In this essay, I compare two pieces of legacy media output on the subject matter in terms of their content (visuals and text) and highlight certain aspects of their language use (discourse analysis and historical semantics).

Second, while the below comparison focuses on two media items, I wish to stress that this is not about pointing fingers at state broadcasters vs. private, or corporate, media outlets. Both sides of this non-argument—state media = bad propagandists, private broadcasters = venerable guardians of accuracy—employ these reprehensible practices, and given governments’ influence on private media via, e.g., subsidies, ‘leaks’, preferential access, and the like, their distinction relates to differences of degree, not of kind.

Third, I shall look closely at the two media items that were published within a few days of each other on 12 and 27 February 2022, respectively. Such close temporal association suggests that the content-creators and the respective editorial boards can be reasonably assumed to have had certain knowledge of both topics.

In what follows, I am comparing the following two media items (sources):

On 12 Feb. 2022, Austrian left-of-centre daily Der Standard published what they hold to be an ‘analysis’ of the anti-mandate protests that rocked Vienna and many other cities back in the depths of winter. In their piece ‘Corona Protests: Flying Dangerous Flags’, Colette M. Schmidt and photographer Marie E. Mark present several far right-wing themes (or memes) they encountered covering anti-injection mandate rallies from November 2021 through early February 2022.

On 27 Feb. 2022, Christian Körber’s article ‘Putin’s Nazi Tales about Ukraine’ appeared on Austrian state broadcaster ORF’s website, which focused on Russia’s justification of its ‘special military operation’. In it, Mr. Körber tries his hands at dis-assembling what he calls ‘selective information, disinformation, and, as it must very well be called, [Russian] propaganda’.

Do note that given the scale of both events, this cannot be but a qualitative undertaking. Part of the associated limitations stem from this being an enquiry into current affairs, in addition to the sheer amounts of potential sources and the naturally incomplete nature of the available documentation. Future historians may be the ultimate arbiters on the veracity of any of the claims made by these authors.

Note, finally, that these media items were originally published in German: all translations and, if not noted otherwise, all emphases are mine. Credit for all original content belongs to the respective authors and photographer.

---

If you found this introduction interesting, please venture over to Propaganda in Focus, which published my essay on 21 July 2022.

Also, please share the essay and the information contained therein widely.

Finally, while I was invited to a bunch of interviews etc. in German-language countries, I’ve also had a long conversation with South African engineer and France-based podcaster Hügo Krüger about this article and wide range of other topics:

If you found this interesting, please subscribe to Hügo’s channel.

Have a good day, despite the above-related content.