This edited volume examines the myths of conspiracy within radical-right and fascist cultures and practices from the late nineteenth century onward. While its scope is broad, most contributions focus on the first half of the twentieth century in both European and global contexts, spanning events from the Great War and the Russian Revolutions to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines and geographical areas, the volume explores the cultural roots, forms, political strategies, and effects of conspiracy imagery within counter-revolutionary, reactionary, fascist, and neo-fascist currents. Particular attention is paid to antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism as strategies for legitimizing radical-right and fascist movements and governments, as well as to their role in mobilizing and polarizing politics and society, especially in wartime contexts.

Marco Bresciani is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Florence. He has received fellowships at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione (Milano), Remarque Institute for European Studies (New York University), the Centre de Recherches Politiques R. Aron (EHESS, Paris), the Centre for Advanced Studies in Rijeka, the University of Zagreb, the Institute for Contemporary History of Ljubljana. His main research field are the political and intellectual of Italian and European antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, the political and social history of fascism, nationalism and conservatism in interwar Europe, with a special focus on the post-Habsburg Upper Adriatic. He has published several contributions on these topics, and among them a work on the antifascist revolutionary group of “Giustizia e Libertà” (Learning from the Enemy. An Intellectual History of European Antifascism, 2024), and an edited volume on Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (2021).Francesco Cassata is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Genoa. He has written extensively on the history of racism, eugenics, genetics, and molecular biology. He serves on the Board of Directors of ComFas (the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies) and is co-founder, with Guri Schwarz, of CENTRA – the Centre for the History of Racism and Anti-racism in Modern Italy. He is author of Racism and Antisemitism in Fascist Italy: The Politics, Ideology, and Imagery of “La Difesa della razza” (2025), and Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (CEU Press, 2011).

Introduction - Marco Bresciani (University of Florence), Francesco Cassata (University of Genoa)
Post-war crisis, Imperial Transitions, Conspiratorial Myths
2. Marco Bresciani (University of Florence), Sovereignty Panics and Myths of Conspiracy: Regime Change, “Slavic” and “Bolshevik” Plots, and Fascism in the Post–1918 Upper Adriatic
3. Grzegorz Krzywiec (Polish Academy of Sciences), Making Antisemitism Global? Transnational, National, and Borderland Dimensions of the Genesis of Polish Fascism (1919–1922)
4. Béla Bodó (University of Bonn), Hyperreality and Militia Violence in Hungary during the White Terror, 1919–1921
Antisemitism, anti-Bolshevism, and the Radical Right
5. Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), The Judeo-Bolshevik Myth: The Enduring Power of a Twentieth Century Conspiracy Theory
6. Ignazio Veca (University of Pisa), In the Shadow of the Great Rabbi: The Making of the Jews Conspiracy Plot in the Nineteenth Century
7. Valeria Galimi (University of Florence), Conspiracy Myths and Judeo-Bolshevism. The Welt-Dienst of Erfurt in the 1930s
8. Michael Hagemeister (Ruhr University, Bochum), A Russian Reactionary in Italy: Nikolai Zhevakhov and the Myth of the Judeo-Masonic World Conspiracy
9. Claus B. Christensen (Roskilde University), Conspiracy Theories and National Socialist Subculture in Denmark
The Enemy Within and Without: Fascist and Anti-Fascist Propagandic Images of Conspiracy between the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War
10. Marla Stone (The American Academy in Rome and Occidental College), Italian Fascist Wartime Conspiracy Theories: Burning Churches and Stolen Children
11. Lewis Driver (European University Institute), Chasing Masonic Ghosts: Francoist and Falangist Persecution of Freemasonry in the Province of Caceres (1933–1943)
12. Blasco Sciarrino (Central European University), “From Patriots to Traitors:” Fascist War Veterans’ Politics of History and the Criminalization of Italian Jews, 1938–1945
13. Alberto Murru (Newcastle University), Fascist Responses to the “Bolshevik Threat:” The 1936 Police Collaboration between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
14. Sarah Panzer (Missouri State University), Händler und Helden: Fascist Anti-Globalism and the German-Japanese “Revolt against the West”
15. Alessandro Salvador (Aberystwyth University) and Jacopo Calussi (University of Rome 3), “Voci dall’Italia invasa.” Propaganda, Rumors, and Popular Reception in the Italian Social Republic, 1943–45
16. Emanuel-Marius Grec (University of Heidelberg), “Jews as the Enemy:” The Odessa Massacres and the Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
Forging and Framing Conspiracies
16. Victor Isaac Taranto (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Henry Wickham Steed and the Limits of Conspiracy
17. Lorenzo Ferrari (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), “A Persistent Psychological Complex.” Richard Hofstadter, Norman Cohn, and the Pathological Dimension of Conspiracy
18. Anna Eva Grutza (Central European University) Fascism and Communism as Pathology: The Paranoid Style and the Theory of Unitotalitarianism
19. Paul Jackson (University of Northampton), The Rise of Militant Accelerationism and the Emotive Temporality of Contemporary Neo-Nazism
Afterword - Constantin Iordachi (CEU, Budapest/Vienna)
Index