[ Far-rightists glorify one nation united under one language, yet
are adept at using translation to spread their politics. E-commerce
behemoths like Amazon allow fascism in translation the reach and
veneer of a successful global business venture.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FASCISM IN MULTIPLE TRANSLATIONS  
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Yuliya Komska
November 4, 2019
Boston Review
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_ Far-rightists glorify one nation united under one language, yet are
adept at using translation to spread their politics. E-commerce
behemoths like Amazon allow fascism in translation the reach and
veneer of a successful global business venture. _

Image: Institut für Zeitgeschichte/Alexander Markus Klotz // Boston
Review,

 

A widespread misconception, exacerbated by the English-only bigotry of
Make America Great Again and Brexit, is that xenophobic, racist, or
oppressive ideologies are always doggedly monolingual—and,
conversely, that multilingualism exclusively serves the goals of
democracy, pluralism, and open-mindedness. However, the ability to
communicate across languages is disappointingly nonpartisan, and
history teems with accounts of overtly despotic polyglottery.
Legendary is the ancient Graeco-Persian king Mithridates VI, who ruled
twenty-two nations with laws in as many tongues, only to “harangue
each [people] without employing an interpreter,” as Pliny the Elder
recorded. Multilingualism does not come hallmarked with tolerance or
righteous dissent.

Far-right language politics has long been a _languages_ politics,
and thus a politics of translation.

Related is the misapprehension that the entirety of the far right
lives by the rules of “mother-tongue fascism
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nation with one language. Surely this belief has its acolytes, such as
the white nationalist U.S. congressman Steve King, who has spent a
lifetime promulgating monolingual policies, or the German politician
Stephan Brandner, who has waged purist campaigns to extirpate
[[link removed]] loanwords. But amidst
the panoply of present-day right-wing worldviews, “mother-tongue
fascism” is unlikely to ever carry the day, as its parochialism
makes it far less transportable than the sprawling, internationalist
agendas of neo-Nazism or White Power.

Linguistic diversity was not at all antithetical to classic European
fascism, either—quite the contrary. Under Hitler and Mussolini,
linguist Christopher Hutton explains
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multilingualism helped both with lobbying for the _Volk_’s minority
rights abroad and with persuading others to join the cause. An arm of
the Foreign Office in Nazi Germany, the German Office of Information
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even networked clandestinely through independent publishers to
translate and disseminate propaganda against the Allies, while Nazi
fiction and nonfiction alike would continue to be printed for export
in languages other than German despite the direst of paper shortages.
As late as fall 1941, notes the preeminent scholar of Nazi
translation Kate Sturge
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Writers founded the European Writer’s Association to replace the
ousted PEN Club and oversee international promotions of translated
books. In Mussolini’s Italy, similarly, translation gained traction
as a vaunted “instrument of penetration” into cultures, markets,
and minds, according to Sturge and colleague Christopher Rundle.
Transnational fascism was by necessity translational.

Far-right language politics, in other words, has long been
a _languages_ politics, a politics of translation. And in recent
years, right-wing politicians have demonstrated increasing savvy with
using translation to spread their messages. This spring, when
Italy’s notorious Eurosceptic and xenophobe Matteo Salvini (then
deputy prime minister) announced a European right-wing parliamentary
alliance, the event was simultaneously interpreted into three
languages, with slogans in several more flashing in the background.
Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD)—despite
rallying to enshrine German as the Federal Republic’s official
language and lobbying against teaching English in primary
schools—has publicized its platform in English, Spanish, French,
Hungarian, and Czech. The choice of languages suggests not only an
overture to global readers and western neighbors, but also an attempt
to court allies in countries where right-wing parties have been
gaining clout and where centuries of Germanophone dominance left
messy, unprocessed, and disparate legacies. Neither are the
Conservative People’s Party of Estonia, Hungary’s Jobbik, and the
Finns Party quite as monolingual as some might picture.

The stance has been a boon for far-right Internet users. In late
March, translations of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto from
English into other languages appeared on the anonymous board
8chan/pol
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a site popular with white supremacists. And on the neo-Nazi website
Stormfront, participants have for years convened to debate the
relative merits of different translations of Hitler’s _Mein Kampf_.
A conversation from April 2012, for example, opened with the
declaration that in a recent translation by Michael Ford,
“Hitler’s true message comes thru.” But not everyone agreed.
Some wondered if Ford was ideologically reliable, grumbling to
“never trust a new translation.” Others rambled semi-coherently
about translation methods. And one user concluded that learning German
may be best, after all. It is an unsettling image of neo-Nazis giving
translation more thought than most of their opponents.

The far right’s instrumentalization of languages in the plural
points to a flaw in current discourse: journalists and scholars often
speak of a shared
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language, but rarely offer much in the way of detail about what that
means. If there is a fascist language, who makes it, how, where, and
with what ingredients? It is a catchy term, no doubt, but references
to it rarely do more than conjure up a slippery abstraction of
uncertain origins and proportions, vested with agency
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as though speaker-less. The public is left with an image of a common
fascist language as a difficult-to-counter, monolithic, monolingual,
unfathomable tool that gives the far right a ready and unfair
advantage. Only there is nothing monolithic, monolingual,
unfathomable, abstract, or even unpreventable about it. There is no
secret fascist-language manufacturing plant where brownshirts sweat
over assembly lines in the depths of Mississippi, Southern California,
or Oregon. So what, then, is fascist language, and how does it emerge
in translation?

[section separator]

‘Mother-tongue’ fascism is unlikely to carry the day, as it
is far less transportable than the sprawling, internationalist
agendas of neo-Nazism or White Power.

The story of former German skinhead and white supremacist Achim
Schmid—who is now an anti-racist activist and goes by TM
Garret—illustrates the workings of translational fascism vividly, as
languages were his gateways into neo-Nazism from the start. Born in
1975, Schmid was a bullied child, asserting himself at school by
telling Hitler jokes when laughing about Hitler was still taboo in
West Germany. Among his peers, he alone took the risk, and it paid off
by earning his peers’ attention, if not their esteem. Meanwhile,
English provided an escape. Schmid recalls spending his fifth-grade
summer poring over textbooks, in avoidance of bullies and excited to
learn his favorite song lyrics properly, instead of mumbling
gibberish.

By 1999 he had discovered that singing white-supremacist rock in
nearly fluent English was a reliable path to becoming not only
respected but also popular, at least in certain circles. He began
collaborating with the neo-Nazi record label NSM-88 and playing at
right-wing music festivals across Europe. One night, a gig in Sweden
concluded with an unexpected invitation to meet Erik Blücher, a
mouthpiece of late twentieth-century Scandinavian neo-Nazism and
author (under the aliases Erik Nilsen and Max Hammer) of incendiary
propaganda. The two sat down in a tavern in the Danish coastal town
Helsingør, and Schmid walked away with a commission to translate
Blücher’s English-language screeds and his organization’s website
into German.

Banging out the lines by dark, family asleep, Schmid had an unforeseen
revelation. The neo-Nazi songs, he came to realize, were little more
than piles of disjointed slogans. Attention-hungry youth screamed them
without necessarily feeling a deep connection to the words’
meanings. Or they were, in many cases, blather with no real meaning to
speak of. By contrast, Blücher’s texts—actionable
how-tos—coldly dished out the pros and cons of racist, antisemitic,
and xenophobic terrorism.

Translating Blücher’s writings changed Schmid’s relationship to
language and jolted him into an awareness of his agency. When I spoke
to him recently, he pointed out how translation requires activating
“one’s own” idiom for a radicalizing act of
coauthorship—translation scholars Christopher Rundle and Kate Sturge
speak of the “active intervention” of translation. No doubt,
Schmid had thought of himself as a radical: just months earlier, he
had left Germany’s well-established National Democratic Party in
repudiation of its too-civil self-grooming and joined the skinheads.
But was he radical enough to translate an entire manual for violence?
He hesitated, in fear—of a police raid, an arrest, a life in prison.
Not hesitation borne out of responsibility—not yet. Fear won, and in
September 2000 he quietly parted ways with the skinheads and allegedly
never contacted Blücher again, although some of his translations were
already out there. How many and where exactly, he was not sure, nor
did he care to learn.

Schmid may have left the skinheads, but racism and xenophobia did not
leave him. If anything, they intensified as Schmid lost patience with
nativism’s circumscribed orbit. In early November 2000, he boarded a
flight to Mississippi to be inducted into the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
While the KKK had had several active branches in Germany, its
propaganda, Schmid says, had not yet made the crossing. Handbooks,
including the so-called “Kloran,” or the “white book” of
rules, remained untranslated into German, and many German members and
potential recruits lacked the English skills to comprehend the
abundant ritual convolutions. Fresh from his Mississippi ceremony,
Schmid, a newly minted “Grand Dragon,” vowed to change that in his
“Realm of Germany.”

Schmid did not kill, this much is true—but what if the words that he
translated into German _did_?

Between 2000 and 2002, the year when Schmid left the far right for
good, he did more than mechanically swap English words for their
German equivalents. What translator does that, anyway? His new
assignment called for elaborate exegetic acrobatics to adapt the
KKK’s Christian fundamentalism to the German neo-Nazis’ entrenched
paganism. Dictionaries and imagination were not enough, so Schmid
embraced online Bible translation tools, tracing the KKK’s favored
biblical terms and quotations to their Hebrew and Greek origins, then
bending what he found to fit his goal. The result was an inebriating
feeling of personal empowerment. True, Schmid was no Mithridates VI,
but he had performed quite the somersault for a man who had never gone
to university.

In retrospect, his sophomoric linguistics seem risible. Yet at stake,
he understands, is tremendous harm: in 2012 Schmid learned that his
KKK cell had been traced to the German neo-Nazi group the National
Socialist Underground (NSU), which murdered nearly a dozen immigrants
and carried out fourteen armed bank robberies. This revelation started
him on the journey to penance. Schmid did not kill, this much is
true—but what if the words that he translated into German _did_? He
may never know for sure, but he knows he cannot take them back.

[section separator]

Today’s Schmids face a changing reality. While many operations of
translational fascism remain spontaneous, the scrappy DIY method that
Schmid exemplified increasingly exists alongside structured,
centralized approaches plugged into global e-commerce via behemoths
such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble—so far, with impunity. These
technological advances have allowed fascism in translation to have a
wider reach and the veneer of an internationally successful business
venture.

A case in point is the Budapest-based publisher Arktos Media
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which sells its books through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. On its
YouTube channel (Arktos also oversees a website, newsletter, podcast,
and a journal with faux-academic flair) the house prides itself on
being “the leading English-language publisher of the European New
Right” with “more than 150 titles in fourteen different
languages.” Its online portal offers one-stop shopping for speakers
not only of French, English, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, but also
of smaller languages such as Dutch, Greek, Italian, Polish, Croatian,
and Czech. Some bestsellers, such as the Austrian-born
identitarian Markus Willinger’s
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Identity_, are available in most of these, usually introduced by the
translator or staff editor with a semblance of neutrality: their
readers aren’t sheeple, so shouldn’t they make up their own minds?
The price points also tell a story about the publisher’s eagerness
to unlock markets with fewer moneyed readers: while the
English-language edition of Willinger, for example, costs as much as
$17.50, translations come in at under $12 and, in the case of some
Eastern European languages, even under $5. Arktos’s grasp of market
forces may rival some giants of the trade.

Global e-commerce behemoths Amazon and Barnes & Noble have allowed
fascism in translation to have a wider reach and the veneer of an
internationally successful business venture.

Arktos can be coy about its translators. A few are undoubtedly in
house, including CEO and founder Daniel Friberg, another influential
Swedish neo-Nazi. Others, in contrast to Achim Schmid, show a penchant
for genteel intellectual self-aggrandizement that reeks as much of
yesteryear’s mothballed academic tweed as of groomed “alt-right”
posturing. For example, Arktos’s editor-in-chief and YouTube channel
host, John Bruce Leonard, who translates the para-fascist Italian
thinker Julius Evola, is unironically introduced as a onetime student
of “philosophy, letters, and languages in a university curriculum
based exclusively on the great books of the Western Tradition.”
According to the website, he resides in Italy to “nouris[h] his
ever-living preoccupation with the heritage and the future of
Europe.” Meanwhile, chief translator and editor Roger Adwan’s
biographical notes—“multilingual since early childhood,”
“fortunate enough to live in various countries across several
continents,” university-educated with a focus on translation—could
apply to a great many language professionals.

But most Arktos translators are not full-time staff, nor are they even
clearly identifiable far-right sympathizers. Some may have stumbled
into the enterprise for lack of other publishing options rather than
out of conviction. They can be difficult to tell apart from an average
academic relativist on university payroll. “A wise man learns from
everyone,” Michael Millerman
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an Arktos translator with a doctoral degree in political theory from
the University of Toronto, told me via email. “I see it as the
reception of a guest into one’s home for conversation,” he went
on, “[but] I do not think that the intimate reception of ideas is
equivalent to uncritical belief in those ideas.” Millerman’s early
experience with translating one of Heidegger’s most influential
modern-day admirers, chief ideologue of Russian Neo-Eurasianism and
critic of Western (neo)liberalism Aleksandr Dugin, was pertinent to
his research. Allegedly, a mentor encouraged Millerman to publish his
translations, but the relationship with Arktos materialized only
because Dugin already had a contract with the press.

What if, one wonders, a mainstream publisher had come along, one
unwilling to pretend that far-right literature is like every other
sort—or that all potential readers possess equal desire and capacity
for discernment? What if its editors had asked for a soberly critical
framing, complete with detailed footnotes, contextual commentary, or
other forms of annotation? What if this publisher’s marketing
experts had linked the resulting translations to books with
substantive analysis—rather than to a slew of other innocently
presented ring-wing screeds? Would this shrink fascism in translation
to a smaller size?

Antifascists have frequently carried out translations of fascist
texts—Not to ‘learn from everyone,’ but to know whom to fight
and why.

It might—and it has. Translation, depending on context, can bolster
ideas, but it can just as easily discredit them. And indeed,
antifascists have frequently carried out translations of fascist
texts. Not to “learn from everyone,” but to know whom to fight and
why. German resistance fighter Greta Kuckhoff collaborated with the
UK’s first _Mein Kampf _translator, James Murphy, and opposed
Murphy’s attempts to improve Hitler’s prose. “I wanted the book
to retain its shameless stirring up of the masses,” she later
recalled. In the United States, journalist Dorothy Thompson, fiercely
critical of Hitler, blurbed the 1937 U.S. reissue of the book,
endearing the author to few readers and provoking the Nazi
government’s formal complaints. And when the _New York
Times _reviewed _Mein Kampf_’s most widely read English
translation, it thanked the translator, Ralph Manheim, for serving the
country well “by producing the first English Hitler translation
which does justice to the author.” “Here, for the first time, you
get Hitler’s prose almost as unreadable in English as it is in
German,” the paper wrote.

While such efforts must be part of the campaign to combat
international fascism, they are inseparable from the work of
deradicalization, which requires much more robust and extensive
financial and logistical support from authorities at every level, as
well as from those who have experienced it firsthand and then turned
away. In addition, online retailers such as Amazon
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Barnes & Noble must be pressured to ban uncritical editions of
far-right texts and to de-platform neo-Nazi distributors; similar
restrictions on YouTube
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set a notable if imperfect precedent. While context and critical
reframing are important, we must not delude ourselves into believing
that fascism in translation will dissipate without such direct
interventions.

_[Essayist YULIYA KOMSKA is an associate professor of German Studies
at Dartmouth College. Together with Michelle Moyd and David Gramling,
she coauthored the book Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to
Civic Language [[link removed]].]_

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