The Far Right Has Gone Global, and So Has Its Conspiratorial Racism
The far right across the world is mixing and matching racist, conspiratorial rhetoric with little regard for national origins. Thomas Friedman’s flat Earth is here, but instead of pluralism, it’s prejudice that has gone global.
A billboard seen with portraits of then European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and Hungarian-born US billionaire George Soros and a slogan reading “You too have a right to know what Brussels is preparing” on February 22, 2019 as part of an anti-immigration campaign in Budapest, Hungary. (Laszlo Balogh / Getty images)
Earlier this month, the official Twitter/X account of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — India’s far-right governing party — posted an image depicting opposition leader Rahul Gandhi as a puppet of Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. It was not the first time the country’s ruling Hindu nationalists had invoked such rhetoric. Last summer, after a meeting between Gandhi and a well-known human rights activist in New York, India’s minister of minority affairs fumed: “When it is clear to every Indian what George Soros intends to do, why is Rahul Gandhi hobnobbing with those who are funded by Soros?”
On its face, such incidents are a bit perplexing. As Emily Tamkin, author of 2020’s The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for Open Society, noted in July, India does not have a history of antisemitism analogous to that of the United States or the various countries in Europe where Soros conspiracies have become prevalent. While it’s certainly not surprising to see far-right politicians draw on racist conspiracy theories, it’s nonetheless a little odd given the context. Indeed, when onetime foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal faced a backlash over his invocation of antisemitic tropes in a salvo against the Wall Street Journal, he sounded genuinely perplexed, asking: “How does antisemitism come into all this?”
In making sense of the uptick in antisemitic conspiracism in India, Tamkin explains:
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