With the reviews and interviews in for a new book, British newspaper readers are getting an insight into how politics now works. Fascist Yoga, by the arts provocateur Stewart Home, is being trailed heavily as showing how historically what he calls ‘modern postural practice’ was attractive to 20th century fascists. He means actual fascists, not figures on the contemporary centre right.
Home’s serious point—he “wanted to do a headstand. However, after some cursory research, he realised something troubling: so did the Waffen-SS,” according to the struggling Observer news site—is providing the hook for headlines that scream yoga is fascist, secretly fascist, a breeding ground for fascists or ‘merely’ racist in nature.
As europeanconservative.com has pointed out before, the hyperbole reflects a tendency to present anyone to the right of Ursula von der Leyen, or even Keir Starmer, as ‘far right’ or worse. Even the English countryside is now ‘racist.’ Now satirists are beginning to wake up to the way that such labelling has gotten out of control—while this publication advises readers to take heart from the allegation.
Despite the book’s careful and specialist scholarship—subtitled Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and The New Order In Wellness—UK newspaper coverage of Fascist Yoga is symptomatic of a wider issue. Its readers may well end up being addressed according to their existing worldview. Those who fear the growth of what they see as the ‘far right’ according to an increasingly expansive definition could mourn the corruption of yoga, previously connected to the counterculture of the 1960s (although perhaps less than they think, according to Home). Those bemused by widespread allegations of fascism and the creeping definition of ‘far right’ will see yet more of the same.
