Exnominated Anti-Semitism? Reframing the Paranoid Hate-speech of Spanish National-populism

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this publication is to critically rethink Manfred Böcker’s classic notion of “Antisemitismus ohne Juden” (Böcker, M. 2000. Antisemitismus ohne Juden: Die zweite Republik, die antirepublikanische Rechte und die Juden. Spanien 1931 bis 1936. Berlin: Peter Lang) and to translate it within the contemporary context of the Spanish Nationalpopulismus (Hirschmann, K. 2017. Der Aufstieg des Nationalpopulismus. Wie westliche Gesellschaften polarisiert werden. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung; Wilp, M. 2019. “Konfrontation statt Konsens: Der Aufschwung des Nationalpopulismus in den Niederlanden: Die politische Auseinandersetzung um Migration und Integration.” In Rechtspopulismus in Einwanderungsgesellschaften, edited by H. U. Brinkmann, and I. Panreck, 187–215. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften) represented by the radical party Vox España. The existence of a formula of “Anti-Semitism without Jews and without Anti-Semites” (Botsch, G., and C. Kopke. 2016. “Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten?” In Wut, Verachtung, Abwertung Rechtspopulismus in Deutschland, edited by R. Melzer, D. Molthagen, A. Zick, and B. Küpper, 178–194. Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung; Wodak, R. 2018. “The Radical Right and Antisemitism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, edited by J. Rydgren, 1–33. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online) seems to acquire corporeity in the “Civil-War-like” lexical arsenals (Rivas Venegas, M. 2018. Propaganda activities of Willi Münzenberg in Support of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. An Approximation to His Visual and Rhetorical Communication Strategies. Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung / Münzenberg Forum, 2019) of a party acutely connected to its Francoist past and to the paranoia of the “Francmason-Jewish-Bolshevist” conspiracy. This article aims to offer new perspectives on the study of national-populism via the parallel analysis of its “lexical arsenals” and visual-performative dispositives, what we here and in further publications identify as the messa in scena populista. It aims to fulfill the complex task of identifying the latent or indirect traces of Anti-Semitism in a party that chose the Muslim community as its preferred and most visible scapegoat, applied the tested political formula of the transnational nouvelle droite, yet never fully abandoned certain aspects of the Francoist and Spanish fascist worldview.