Murder fantasies in memes: fascist aesthetics of death threats and the banalization of white supremacist violence

Abstract

This paper traces the recent turn to humour, irony and ambiguity embodied in the adaptation of memes into the repertoire of online propaganda of the militant neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement; in a process, we dub the 'memefication' of white supremacism. Drawing on a combination of quantitative visual content analysis (VCA) and in-depth visual analysis focused on iconography and symbolism, we explore all memes (N = 634) created and circulated by the group around the 2018 general elections in the country. The analysis proceeds in two steps: First, we present the results of the VCA in which we identified five thematic categories of memes crafting white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitic ideas onto esoteric and popular culture iconography then to map these across a matrix of content and form. We then proceed to the analysis of the cluster of memes coded as violent to explore the iconography and symbolism used to promote violence and death threats and render them banal. We draw on a range of recent scholarship on the entanglement of memes in the rise of the farright and engage critical perspectives on the necropower of fascism to explore the interplay between ambiguous, playful and jokey imagery on the one hand and the murder fantasies and serious threat of white supremacist violence at the heart of neo-Nazi ideology, on the other.

The way forward: Adult educators combating mis/disinformation via formal and informal education

“…In a landscape that is changing as rapidly as the one we inhabit, it is important to realize that media is where most self‐directed learning, incidental learning, and informal learning are enacted. It is also where much of the transformative learning is happening with adults, as is made clear by the many emergent stories of right‐wing radicalization through social media (Askanius & Keller, 2021; Young & Boucher, 2022). So we must ask ourselves, “Are we adult educators simply for the paycheck and the flexibility, and so damn the rest of the population, the country, and democracy?” Or are we change‐makers and promoters of collective liberation and self‐recovery in the tradition of Myles Horton, Paulo Freire, Ida B.…”

Local–Digital Activism: Place, Social Media, Body, and Violence in Changing Urban Politics

“…Many scholars have highlighted the other side of social media, identifying it as a sphere that fosters violence, contributing to the spread and mainstreamization of extremist ideologies (Askanius & Keller, 2021; Daniels, 2018; DeCook, 2018). The ungoverned infrastructure of the internet provides and cultivates hate cultures (Ganesh, 2018).…”

Detecting and Understanding Harmful Memes: A Survey

“…Harmful propaganda memes are prominent in online fora that promote xenophobia, racism, anti-semitism, and antifeminism/anti-LGBTQ Dafaure, 2020]. The memetic language involves similar style, symbolism, and iconography for contrasting inclinations [Greene, 2019] towards recruitment and promoting violent racial supremacy [DeCook, 2018;Askanius and Keller, 2021]. [Mittos et al, 2020] investigated the genetic testing discourse, involved in establishing racial superiority and promoting far-right ideologies, by studying correlations using topic modeling, contextual semantics, toxic content analysis, and pHash to characterize the visual cues in memes.…”

“…It is thus important to decode the discourse and to understand the communication that memes are part of [DeCook, 2018]. Exploring the points of the confluence of youth with far-right memes will help highlight where and how messages of extreme violence circulate and transit back and forth between malicious actors and receptive users [Askanius and Keller, 2021]. It could also be insightful to examine how symptomatic the discourse rhetoric of the anecdotal reference is, within the backdrop of rooted antisemitic perspectives, like the nebulous Othering.…”