Journal for the Study of Radicalism

Editors' Introduction

2025-03-02T15:43:12-05:00

Written by Dr. Arthur Versluis and Dr. Josh Vandiver, this article introduces the articles and book reviews of JSR 19.1 (2025).

Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Frank Jacob and Mario Keßler (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).

2025-02-22T17:25:26-05:00

Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Frank Jacob and Mario Keßler (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).

Book Review: For a Just & Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexico Borderlands, 1900-1938

2025-02-25T16:22:59-05:00

Molly Todd, Long Journey to Justice: El Salvador, the United States, and Struggles against Empire (Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021).

2025-02-22T17:23:36-05:00

Molly Todd, Long Journey to Justice: El Salvador, the United States, and Struggles against Empire (Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021).

Becoming Hyperborean

2025-02-14T12:31:17-05:00

This article explores the subtle and not-so-subtle politics of the YouTube channel AlphaAffirmations, which offers motivational videos implicitly aimed at white males so they may activate the “blood memory” of their primordial roots in Hyperborea, a mythical land in the far north from which white people supposedly sprang. It argues that in AlphaAffirmations impressions of New Age spirituality provide a sort of “cover” for the regeneration of white masculinity – here presented as a psychophysical and affective initiatory process that I call “becoming Hyperborean” – that AlphaAffirmations promotes through self-affirmations subtly tinged with esoteric fascism. To support this argument this article 1) briefly surveys the past and present links between the myth of Hyperborea, esoteric fascism, and a contemporary “crisis of masculinity”; 2) explores the channel’s engagement with New Age ideas and imagery; 3) analyzes how the “I affirmations” in the “Hyperborean Gnosis” playlist and elsewhere on the channel shift to “we affirmations” as the implicit politics are made clearer; and 4) unpacks how user comments register a variety of responses, from the psychophysical effects, uses, and benefits attributed to the affirmations themselves to far-right acknowledgments of the channel’s true function. In so doing this article uses AlphaAffirmations as a case study of the often-unacknowledged overlap between the Euro-American far right and New Age spiritualities, a space for potential recruitment and radicalization.

William S. Burroughs and the Wreckers of Civilization

2025-02-27T11:43:36-05:00

The majority of scholarship on radicalism focuses on political activists, and only occasionally on literary authors. This is of course to be expected, as there is so much to be explored in areas ranging from anarchism, communism, environmental activism, terrorism, and communalism, to name those types of radicalism discussed in the twenty years of JSR articles thus far. At the same time, only a handful of JSR articles have looked into radical literary figures. In what follows, we will look into the life and work of novelist William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) in terms of occultism and religious, social, and political radicalism. As we will see, Burroughs is an instructive case study in left radicalism, especially when seen in relation to the then-emergent critical theorism of the 1980s.

Anti-Christian Iconoclasm by ISIS in the Middle East

2025-02-18T18:28:56-05:00

This article examines the destruction of Christian cultural heritage by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, particularly between 2014 and 2017. What ISIS’s iconoclastic attacks demonstrate is that the physical destruction of Christian symbolic objects – such as crosses and shrines, and, more importantly, churches and monasteries – is erasing any trace of their long history in the Middle East. Through five case studies – namely St. Elijah’s Monastery, the Green Church, the Virgin Mary Church, the St. Markourkas Church, and the Saint Elian Monastery – it can be easily deduced that the devastation of such invaluable Christian heritage is strategically designed to eradicate the identities of Christian communities – tearing their social fabric apart. ISIS’s propagandistic message of its pro-caliphate vision is not only a form of symbolic supremacy through visual images (like a symbolic spectacle); it will also have a profound psychological impact on Christian groups and weaken their aspiration of restoring their future in the region of Syria and Iraq. ISIS is keenly aware of how crucial heritage is to a civilization. This is the reason why the jihadist group destroyed many heritage sites in just several years. Unfortunately, it is efficient. For ISIS, communicating the destruction of Christian objects is a form of symbolic spectacle that is widely disseminated through online social media.

Self-Criticism and Self-Destruction

2024-12-21T20:44:51-05:00

Scholars have long recognized that even though the global communist movement was atheistic, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century it often took the form of a political religion. That’s why it’s no surprise to find communists imitating Christians and sometimes adopting their practices. For example, just as Christians utilized a rigorous form of self-criticism to maintain their discipline and commitment to their religion, communists like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin taught that self-criticism was the key to building strong and effective revolutionaries. However, while self-criticism could be beneficial in a religion or political organization, it could turn abusive and destructive when used by a cult, which is exactly what the communist movement became under the influence of Stalin and Mao. Both dictators not only built cults around themselves, but infused the global communist movement with their cult practices, and self-criticism was the weapon used to maintain conformity and control. By listening to the testimony of former cult members of groups like the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), the Democratic Workers Party (DWP), the Organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and the Weather Underground, this article will show how communist cults corrupted the practice of self-criticism and helped lead to the downfall of the radical movement.

Counterculture in the Writings of the Hocking Siblings, 1900-1905

2025-02-02T17:56:04-05:00

This article explores religious and ideological eclecticism in one prominent literary Cornish family at the turn of the century. In 1894, Salome Hocking married the radical publisher Arthur Fifield, whose social cohort endorsed a return to the land, vegetarianism, pacifism, rational dress, the renunciation of servants, and other radical causes. Into the 1900s, Hocking and her siblings, both Methodist ministers, contested and affirmed one another’s principles through their varied responses to communal counterculture. An affiliate of the rural Purleigh Colony in Essex and Whiteway Colony in Gloucestershire, Salome Hocking wrote her novel Belinda the Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (1905) as a fictional corrective to her brother Joseph’s earlier satire on rural settlement The Madness of David Baring (1900). Meanwhile, the eldest brother Silas’s newfound pacifism intersected with certain Tolstoyan sympathies popular in the communes. Taking the siblings’ idiosyncrasies into account, the article identifies parallels and divergences between the progressivism of the Hockings’ homegrown Cornish Methodism and the ‘fringe’ ethics of fellowship at the fin de siècle.

Plotino Rhodakanaty and the Evolution of Fourierist Socialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico

2025-01-05T20:28:23-05:00

The little-known socialist Plotino Rhodakanaty (1828 or 1834–1890) became the main popularizer of “utopian” socialist Charles Fourier’s ideas in late nineteenth-century Mexico. During his 25 years of activism there, Rhodakanaty contributed to labor organizing in Mexico City, agrarian uprisings in the surrounding countryside, and the foundation of Mormon missions in central Mexico. Yet historians of Fourierism have almost entirely neglected him and the impact of Fourier’s ideas on Mexican radicalism. This article uses Rhodakanaty’s life and works to argue that, in the right hands, Fourierism was a highly adaptable early socialist doctrine and is best understood as a forerunner of anarchism.