 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and this week's social problem of the week is ultra right-wing movements. Ultra right-wing movements are on the rise all across Europe. These movements have flourished due to economic distress, rising immigration, and perhaps most important of all, a perceived crisis of representative politics. These movements are not likely to gain actual political power at the national level, but they do shift the terms of national political debates in directions that might be considered unpalatable and certainly undesirable. They're also dangerous in themselves for fomenting violence, intolerance, and extreme forms of social exclusion. Ultra right-wing movements are political social movements that take the idea of the nation as imagined community to extreme lengths. They tend to define the nation in organic terms using the metaphor of a living person or family tree. They embrace the idea that the nation is like a person who has persisted over thousands of years and that the people who exist today as the members of a nation are in some way the people who carry on the heritage of those who have come before. Now it hardly need be said that this is a huge myth for modern nations. In fact, all modern nations, including nations like Germany and France where ultra right-wing movements are very popular, all of these nations are amalgams of dozens of historical nations that have been welded together into a combined nationhood. Yet this does not stop ultra right-wing nationalist movements from imagining that the entire nation is a single organic entity from identifying themselves with the imagined glories of past battles from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Ultra right-wing movements advocate extreme forms of social exclusion, legitimizing expropriation, murder, expulsion of migrants, and in the extreme form of ultra right-wing movements legitimizing genocide. The links between today's ultra right-wing movements and historical Nazism are clear and are even reflected in the use of neo-Nazi symbolism by ultra right-wing movements. Ironically, not just those in Germany, but ultra right-wing movements clear across Europe, including in countries that fought against Nazism like Russia and France. The German Pegida movement is probably the best known of today's ultra right-wing movements in Europe, and it is emphatically anti-Muslim, a stoking hatred of European Muslims in a way that is reminiscent of the Nazis' anti-Semitism. Here you see some photos from Pegida rallies, the idea that Germany may have Sharia law imposed on it simply because of the existence of Syrian refugees in Germany is, of course, an outlandish idea, but it's similar to concerns that were stoked by the Nazis that there were secret Jewish plots to control Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. In both cases there's a vilification of people of a different religion who are seen as taking over society or somehow secretly pulling the strings that control society. A common rhetorical device of the Pegida movement is to take out the trash. Their symbol, as you see in the lower left here, is a trash can with various forms of ideology being thrown into it, and they've been very careful in that symbolism to show Nazism being thrown in the trash at the same time that they show Islamic State being thrown into the trash. But in their language they use the language to take out the trash repeatedly to refer to people in Germany of Turkish or Syrian or Middle Eastern origin calling the people themselves trash and referring to refugees as trash. This kind of anti-immigrant xenophobia is transparently racist, but these political parties and political movements have attracted voters throughout Europe, and here I just repeat a list of successes of far ultra-right wing political movements across European countries in recent elections. The ultra-right wing movements are post-political movements in some of the same ways that Occupy movements are, but they're also very different. Ultra-right wing movements can be thought of as perverse expressions of the modern self rather than as expressions of the post-modern self. Thus, the post-modern Occupy type movements tend to be peaceful but ineffectual. They're composed of post-modern individuals who are interested in self-expression values. The ultra-right wing movements, by contrast, tend to be very violent and potentially very effective. They are modern movements that have actual political objectives, the desire to gain political power, and the desire to use political power to further their ends. If the Occupy movements represent the very complex post-modern self, the ultra-right wing movements are a response to that representing the very simplified modern self. Thank you for listening to this brief lecture. You can find out more about me at Salvaturbo-Bonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.