The west, Right-wings and Islam: Olavo de Carvalho’s perspective

Abstract

The feeling of rejection of Islam has become something taken for granted, with the emergence of the new populist right in various countries and regions of the planet. Especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Islam gained a leading role within what this right proposes to combat. However, the reasons for anti-Islamic sentiment become blurred, if we think that before 9/11, various sectors of the right in Europe and the USA already framed non-European immigrants, or from countries of the so-called third world, as a major problem. When anti-Islamic sentiment appears in right-wing speeches in countries that do not face the issue of immigration so strongly, as in Brazil, this issue becomes even more problematic, making it necessary to investigate the issue in more detail. In this article, we analyze the approach of Islam in thought Olavo de Carvalho, an influential opinion-maker of the current Brazilian right. We seek to understand how his ideas, actually converge with the theoretical and ideological building of the Northern Hemisphere’s Right. We conclude that, rather than an equivalent of the nowadays Euro-American identitarian right, Olavo de Carvalho's proposals fall more closely into the North American Christian Right, which had its period of greatest activation in the 1990s. Olavist right discourses recover a kind of North American right from the cold war, however, incorporating the theme of Islam, having points of contact of the current North American and European right, but not being interchangeable with it.