A review by frankie_s
Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reid Ross

3.0

An incredibly important and comprehensive book on the history of modern fascism, that does effectively draw a lot of points of connection between fascist ideology and other movements (anti-capitalism, ecology, Silicon Valley/tech culture, occupy Wall Street, occultism, punk, Portland, hipster culture are just some of my own reference points that get the fascist creep treatment, but the other obvious ones are there too - MRAs, 4chan etc.). My actual rating is more like 3 given that it doesn’t contextualise a lot especially in the beginning (same problem as Antifa by Mark Bray) which given the amount of information here made it pretty relentless. But I learnt so many things about fascism that feel close to necessary at this point in history, that I’m pushing it up a point.

I felt like there were further dots that could have been joined, in the end, to diagnose this moment. The role of Russia was underdiscussed, for example, and the book barely mentions climate disaster except as a motivation of accelerationists, rather than as a reality of garden-variety capitalism.