Social Media, Politics and the State

Daniel Trottier, Christian Fuchs, Daniel Trottier, Christian Fuchs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317655473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorousresearch considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.

Section Three Civil Counter-Power Against Austerity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764832-7

5 The Rise of Nazism and the Web

Social Media as Platforms of Racist Discourses in the Context of the Greek Economic Crisis

Panos Kompatsiaris and Yiannis Mylonas

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764832-8

1. Introduction

On October 1, 2012, in an interview for a local Greek TV channel, Ilias Kasidiaris, one of the most widely exposed and recognisable MPs of the Greek Nazi ‘Golden Dawn’ (GD) party, made the following statement: “Thankfully we have in our disposal an enormous weapon; this is the internet, where hundreds of thousands of our compatriots managed to learn who we are.”¹ In another interview a couple of months later the same MP admitted once more that, “we [GD] used Facebook as a platform to disseminate our views, since no other TV channel has given us a platform.”² On September 25, 2013, a few days after the killing of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and the arrest of several members of GD, an anonymous witness and ex-party member warns in his testimony to the trial examiner, “So as to protect the unsuspected and especially the youth, I want to say that it would be good that social media (Facebook etc.) be controlled, because through them activities like calling for protest, propaganda and communication take place.”³

Undoubtedly, as the foregoing statements imply, in the past few years the party has been particularly active in social media landscapes. Its members have effectively initiated official and fan pages, personal profiles and closed groups in Web 2.0 platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, enabling visibility and relatively uninterrupted circulation of their material. Although GD also used (and was used) by mainstream media to catch public attention, providing interviews to a variety of hosts and journalists of talk shows, new bulletins, tabloid press and newspapers, within social media it found the opportunity to directly share and potentially validate its version of history and politics, bypassing official communication channels. Indicatively, the circulation of hate speech and calls for violence against all GD’s enemies, racist and anti-Semitic discourse, open praises of former Greek dictators, direct references and praises to less publicly known fascist ideologues, and more concealed praises to Hitler and the Third Reich found an unexpected host in social media networks. As we will see ahead, GD’s strategic use of the Internet and social media can be seen as part of an ideological war that aims to construct localised “regimes of truth” (Foucault 1980) related to national identity, to enable sympathisers to find each other and to build bonds between members.

In this chapter, we examine the strategic use of social media by GD, focusing on the ways it attempts to legitimise its social imaginaries, tactics, strategies and reality constructions, taking advantage of the social turbulence that austerity politics and neo-liberal restructuring have brought since late 2009. While GD’s public legitimisation has been closely interweaving with established state power, manifested in its close relation and frequent collaboration with police forces, its political vision is also distinct from the latter to the extent that it wishes to enable a constituent counter-power, aiming both to disarticulate its liberal dimensions and occupy its apparatuses. GD treats the liberal state apparatus as both a partner and an adversary to be infiltrated and subjugated. This idea of state power as being both a partner and adversary for fascist politics is associated with New Marxist approaches to fascism (Poulantzas 1970; Vajda 1976) that see fascism more as a “relatively autonomous” force and an outcome of specific historical conditions and less as an “inevitable stage” of capitalist development (Kitchen 2003, 58). In reverse, while liberal power often instrumentalises fascist discourse and practices in the form of an “authoritarian governmentality” (Dean 2010), at specific moments—as in the case of the recent persecution of GD members in Greece—it can also explicitly denounce and suppress fascism.

As our analysis indicates, Web 2.0 platforms, which have enhanced possibilities for easy access and spread of decontextualised information, can be particularly effective for giving visibility and potentially constructing an aura of ‘righteousness’ in fascist practices and discourses. GD’s engagement with social media bears similarities with what Meg McLagan and Yates McKee have recently coined as “sensible politics” (2013)—that is, political practices that aim to become visible by claiming a part in a given “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2006).⁴ While McLagan and McKee mainly refer to how these kinds of politics are performed by left-wing and social movements, we draw attention to how the generation of emotion, affect and sensualised responses is also crucial for explicitly fascist politics. GD’s politics in social media, in the form of the circulation of highly aestheticised forms within social networks and contexts, seem to be easily facilitated by social media’s openness and participation, offering possibilities to connect and network without the mediation of established institutions, state or otherwise. This is a point that needs to be stressed, as in the first stages of GD’s appearance, when established media monopolies would not willingly risk being directly or indirectly associated with Nazis, social media were the only channels of communication capable of distributing an explicitly Nazi discourse.

After introducing the political climate that gave rise to a Nazi party in Greece, we develop this thesis by discussing how GD’s utilisation of social media shares explicit similarities with the propaganda principles of Joseph Goebbels. In particular, our understanding of Goebbels’ conception of propaganda comes from the paper “Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda” by Leonard W. Doob, published in 1950 and based on the 6,800 manuscript pages of Goebbels’ diary found in Berlin by American authorities in 1945. Among other sources we use Bramsted’s paper “Joseph Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda 1926–1939,” written in 1954, which describes in a very concise way the prewar propaganda principles, as well as the differences between the period preceding the Nazi succession in power and the one succeeding it. Our aim in this chapter is to show how social media can be used as a tool to promote and effectively contribute to building fascist communities under unstable social conditions that can both exploit and pose a threat to the foundations of the liberal state. Following from this, we also wish to point to the danger of treating social media and Web 2.0 technologies as inherently liberating and revolutionary (Dean 2009), suggesting instead to view them as platforms that enable forms of general social antagonism.

The propagandistic material examined here generally follows the principles of what Walter Benjamin described as the “aestheticization of politics” (2008), meaning the inscription of political affairs to affective representations, or a “spell-binding spectacle and phantasmagoric illusion” (Jay 1992, 45), aiming to sidestep rational argumentation and curb political thinking on social affairs, by giving way to blunt, sensory seduction. The central medium through which aestheticisation takes material form is generally the image, moving or still, usually accompanied by an authoritative quote. Goebbels also saw visual media such as films and posters as possessing greater credibility for the Nazi scope, providing “proof” that spoken or written words could not provide (Doob 1950, 427). According to the visual culture theorist J. Mitchell, the representational clarity of images provides “a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of things, rather than an indirect, unreliable report about things” (quoted in Jay 2002, 269). Images not only possess this kind “evidential force” (Barthes 1981; Tagg 1988) but also are much better suited to provide simple explanatory narratives in the distractive contexts of the webscape. The ostensible purity and communicational uncomplicatedness of Nazi imagery can thus offer sensory orientation in a chaotic world of crisis where complexity prevails. Similar to the image, the ‘slogan’ and the ‘heading’ are other forms of sensible politics that provide a condensed and largely uncomplicated understanding of political affairs. The slogan, the heading and the image have been the principal media through which GD mediated its discourse across the Internet’s endless and largely decontextualised environment of information flow.

1.1 Methodology: Multi-sited Ethnography in Virtual Communities

Our research material has been drawn from a variety of platforms, most importantly from Facebook and YouTube, which are the two most popular Web 2.0 sites that Greek Nazis use. These sites largely differ from each other in terms of the possibilities they offer for content generation and interaction (Fischer, Smith and Yongjian 2012); however, they are brought together on the basis that they are services inspired by Web 2.0 principles, “enabling the users to create and share digital contents” (Giglietto, Rossi and Bennato 2012, 145). As organizations that are relatively autonomous from instituted state power, Web 2.0 services offer possibilities for networking, sharing, interacting and more intense group bonding. Social media foster ties and enable friendships and other “mediated intimacies” (Chambers 2013), with the users’ interactions being both “what is produced in the moment of being social, as well as the object around which sociality occurs” (Fischer, Smith and Yongjian 2012, 102). Our analysis then focuses on how social media are used and by extension give shape to power relations within the particular social-historical setting (Patelis and Hatzopoulos 2013a). Power relations are always in a process of negotiation (Foucault 1980) and, in this case, a precarious outcome of the ways that offline and online practices and events are articulated, distributed, affirmed or possibly contested. These practices and events require translation and interpretation from users, and as a result there is an ongoing deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of community’s identity and self-understanding.

The method we employ to examine Nazi online activities can be best described as ‘multi-sited virtual ethnography,’ a practice that involves tracing the ways that the cultural phenomenon under examination is manifested, communicated and reproduced across virtual sites. According to George Marcus multi-sited ethnography “is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations” (1995, 105), and is suitable for exploring abstract connections between sites, capturing heterogeneity and multiplicity as well as studying difference over time. Here, as part of our ethnographic practice we have spent a considerable amount of time on sites where Greek Nazis communicate their material and perform their identities, mostly in Facebook groups, such as the very popular GD-affiliated “Ellinon diktyo” (Greeks’ network), and YouTube accounts, such as that of ‘iwannis metaxas’ and ‘parkadoroi,’ both proliferate GD users, observing and participating in online conversations. As mentioned, Facebook and YouTube are platforms with rather different architectural structures. Facebook, as a social network, is much more effective in keeping with a flow of information, as well as in mobilising action through event invitations. Although YouTube has social networking capacities too, its function has to do more with archiving and documenting material, which is then potentially circulated around the web.

Following Marcus’ suggestion, we are tracking “the argument, the debate, the controversy, the metaphor” (Hamilakis 2007, 24; Marcus 1995) arising from the dissemination of the material itself. While traditional ethnography takes place over a long period of time in a single location or place, multi-sited ethnography emerges as a method attempting to make sense of the ways identities are performed in a networked world and how our multiple, everyday, virtual or ‘real’ presences inform the ways of behaving, relating and acting. The objective is to give an account of “social phenomena that cannot be accounted for by focusing on a single site” (Falzon 2009, 1) by following their interrelatedness and association. For analysing the content of GD’s online recitations, images and texts, and for mapping the conceptual linking between the traditional Nazi ideology and GD, we employ analytical categories from discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe 1985).

2. The Rise of Nazism in Crisis-Struck Greece

In his 2012 book The black bible of GD, Dimitris Psarras, a researcher, author and journalist studying the far-right phenomenon in Greece for the last thirty years, argues that the most adequate way to describe GD’s ideology, organization and methods is that of a ‘Nazi party,’ as all other terms, fascist, far right or even neo-Nazi, are inadequate. The two national elections of Greece in May and June 2013 gave nearly 7 per cent of the votes to GD, enabling its entry to the Greek parliament as a legitimate political player. Up until then, GD had a very small base of supporters and never obtained above 0.5 per cent in previous national elections (2009). GD was known as an outspokenly Nazi organization, notorious for it...