Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire by Matthew N. Lyons, 2018, Kersplebedeb

From the Introduction:

"... in the 1970s and 1980s, for the first time since World War II, rightists in significant numbers began to withdraw their loyalty from the US government. This marked a sharp break with the right's traditional role as defender of the established order, as one of the forces helping economic and political elites to maintain social control."

Just beginning to understand where the anti-government sentiment that bewildered me so is coming from. It all makes sense in the light of the projected image (and of course created project) of the US as the country of the rule of white men. As other groups were being enfranchised and gradually admitted to power, the sense of government being alienated from the original masters, white men, would inevitably grow. They never envisaged an egalitarian society, or, the only "egalitarianism" they cared for was to exist among one single category of people, white men.

"As an imprecise working definition (not for all times and places but for the United States today), 'far right' is used here to mean political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, inevitable, or desirable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system. This definition cuts across standard ideological divisions."

Imprecise definitions are the only kind that can be true to reality. Fascism is a dynamic category (Roger Griffin: an analytic category) taking on diverse specifics from one country and period to the next.

Other noteworthy ideas: the US isn't (never has been) a democracy, but a society in which "a shifting mix of pluralistic openness and repression", "including opportunities to organize, debate, participate in electoral politics, and criticize those in power" has precluded the emergence of a wholly authoritarian system.

Political repression, though, has been "trending upward for the past several decades".

The author: anarcho-Marxist? Or sympathetic.

Fifty years ago, the seeds of today's far right were already sown but it looked very different. Two large fronts existed, the racists like the KKK using vigilante terrorism to defend Jim Crow segregation and keep black people from voting; and the "Cold Warrior" hard-line rightists of various stripes who focused on anti-communism.

"The modern US far right took shape in stages and in response to a complex series of developments involving popular struggles for social justice..." "the rightward shift within the business community..."--end of New Deal system and the rise of neoliberalism.

It all started in the 1970s, as the US was facing "growing economic challenges from other countries".

Business shifting right intersected with "a grassroots backlash among many middle- and working-class whites to defend traditional social hierarchies and rules against challenges from below."

"Evoking the producerist tradition, right-wing populist initiatives accused liberal elites of giving special favors to communities of color, women, and poor people over "hardworking" white men. Social welfare programs, taxes, and the federal government as a whole became scapegoats for these white people's economic woes and general sense of disempowerment."

Plus:

---new activist coalitions of religious and secular conservatives
---backed by a growing faction of the business community

--RESULT: Reagan

---aspiration: minimal regulation of business, reduction or privatization of social services, low taxes for business and the wealthy, free trade, and relatively unrestricted immigration.

Philosophy behind it all: competition as the defining characteristic of human relations.

Citizen ==> Consumer

Democratic choice ==> best exercised by Buying and Selling

Organization of labour, collective bargaining by trade unions ==> market Distortions that impede forming a natural hierarchy of winners and losers

Inequality is recast as virtuous {...}

Some notes on Chapter 1, Neonazis

How Lyons uses various terms:

"White supremacy can refer either to the system of white racial oppression or to white supremacist ideology. White racial oppression is the web of social, economic, political and cultural institutions and practices whereby people identified as "white" hold privilege and varying degrees of power over other people. {...}

White supremacist ideology says that racial categories are natural and fundamental to human experience; that white people are better and more important than other races; and that whites should hold social, economic, and political power over others. White supremacist ideology... is fundamentally an ideology of violence, in that it justifies and promotes both direct physical attacks and systemic harm against people of non-European descent.

White nationalism is a form of white supremacist ideology that focuses on racial identity as the basis of nationhood. {Leonard Zeskind's usage} ...'white people should have a homeland of their own and run a white nationalist state.'"

(Recalling I've read recently about a town in South Africa that is kept all white--ah yes, Orania: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/24/an-indictment-of-south-africa-whi... )

"Neonazism is a form of white nationalism that borrows or shares key elements of the ... (Nazi) ideology, above all the emphasis on racial antisemitism, Jews being viewed as an evil non-white super-race. {...}

As examples to illustrate how I use these terms, advocates of Jim Crow segregation (in which whites violently subordinated and isolated blacks and other people of color while relying on their labor for everything from farming to childcare) were white supremacist, the League of the South (which glorifies the Confederacy and advocates secession of a white-dominated southern nation) is white nationalist, and the Nationalist Socialist Movement (which models its ideology and much of its symbolism after Hitler's movement) is neonazi."

Some American neonazism's "firsts" in what is now standard ideological fare on the far (and even not-so-far) right (my underlining):

--David Duke "among the first white supremacists to popularize the myth that civil rights legislation and affirmative action have made whites an oppressed group within the US"

--the myth of "white genocide" brought on by "a combination of non-European immigration, legal abortion, interracial marriage, and other measures"

--placing antisemitism at the center of white nationalist theories of power

"As in classical antisemitism, Jews and Jewish power are identified with banks and other financial institutions {...} in this way antisemitism functions as a distorted anti-elitism, what 19th century German socialist August Bebel called 'the socialism of fools'. {...}

Neonazis sometimes mask theri antisemitism as 'anti-Zionism'. There are good reason to criticize the Israeli state's system of apartheid rule, racist violence, and mass displacement of Palestinians. But for neonazis and many other white nationalists, anti-Zionism is based on hatred of Jews, not solidarity with Palestinians. {...} ...the antisemitic fiction that America is under the control of a Zionist Occupation Government, or "ZOG" for short."

Oh so THAT's what that means (keep seeing it in YouTube comments by swivel-eyed loons...)

"Neonazis argue that men and women are fundamentally different by nature and should have different social roles. Most of them advocate male dominance over women and suppression of homosexuality or any kind of gender nonconformity. As in classical fascism, there is sometimes tension between a family-centered patriarchal view {...} and a more race-centered view that white women's main duty is to have lots of babies...{...}"

Note here the recent multi-part programme on France Culture about the "Lebensborn", the Nazi project to breed "superior" Nazi tots, as it was executed in Bois Larris: Le manoir de Bois Larris (1/2) : Une pouponnière nazie en France (The Manor of Bois Larris, a Nazi nursery in France).

Basically, the benighted illegitimate offspring of Nazis and whatever women they got pregnant extramaritally (some German, some Nazi, some foreign, some willing, plenty unwilling) was to be raised in these special nurseries by technicians. In one of the most grotesque ironies imaginable, hundreds of these children suffered all kinds of developmental problems and psychological trauma (the survivors still do).

Back to Lyons:

"some neonazis have criticized certain forms of sexism within the movement, arguing that 'racially conscious' white women should be encouraged to use their full talents and even take on leadership roles, but in recent years neonazis involved in the alt-right have promoted much harsher and more exclusionary forms of misogyny."

TBC

Historical forerunners of American neonazis:

--slave patrols of pre-civil war South

--the original KKK--terrorised newly freed African-Americans and their white allies and "reversed most of the political gains the blacks have made" (we are seeing a repeat of this effort under Trumpism)

--anti-Chinese crusade... culminating in Congress banning all Chinese immigration in 1884

--Klan refounded in 1915 (thanks, D. W. Griffith, you rotter) and becomes a mass movement with millions of supporters in the 1920s but lack of coherence etc. leads to decline

In the period from the 1880s to 1930s "the twin stereotypes of the Jew as 'banker' and 'Bolshevik' embodied a dual image of Jews as both oppressors and subversives."

Whereas, reality check: Jewish masses, the typical or average Jew, was some poor immigrant from Galicia dying of consumption and semi-starvation on the Lower East Side, toiling day and night in sweatshops. (How the other half lives)

--German Nazis drew on many aspects of the US "racial order"--the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow segregation, eugenics-based compulsory sterilization laws that were passed in many US states at the start of the century.

--Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and fascist with millions-strong radio audience. Fades somewhat after Pearl Harbor

--1959, American Nazi Party celebrates Hitler. Founder Rockwell is on good terms with the FBI.

--some other smaller organisations, and Minutemen, "anticommunist paramilitary" that stockpiled weapons. Threatened and attempted assassinations.

Founder DePugh associated with the Christian Identity movement.

In the late 1960s to 1970s, white supremacism blends with a new emphasis on antisemitism.

White nationalist currents that took shape then:

--American Nazi Party offshoots; groups of William Pierce (The Turner Diaries prick), Joseph Tommasi, James Mason

--KKK with David Duke, launches "border watch" against illegal immigration. Plus ça change...

Advocating creation of an all-white nation-state.

--Crypto-fascists. Using as fronts the Populist Party and the Institute for Historical Review (Holocaust denialism)

--Posse Comitatus. The "original" bit: rejecting the legitimacy of all government above the county level--something that I reckon has now spread to all the white militias? Example: the Malheur standoff in Oregon in 2016.

--Christian Identity. Well, now. Doesn't this throw an interesting light on the "KJV English is the God-given language Jesus spake" debates on LT.

...this racist version of Christianity, which teaches that Anglo-Saxons or northern Europeans more generally are the real descendants of the ancient children of Israel and that the Jews of today are evil impostors--in some versions, literally descended from the Devil.

Makes the rejection of the Hebrew and Aramaic scripture more intelligible; also adds fascist evil to batshit insanity. These are the people that support Trump.

In the 1980s the five currents begin coalescing; turning point, the massacre of the members of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 by the United Racist Front, a coalition of the KKK and neonazis. At least one FBI agent was involved in planning the massacre.

Remembering the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, When KKK & Nazis Killed 5 People in Broad Daylight

A shift from the goal of subordination ("putting people in their place") in order to exploit them, to plain extermination.

Next joint KKK-Nazi project was the attempt in 1981 to seize control of Dominica (whaaaa...?)

A right mess of fascistoid nazisoid groups and connections sprouts in the next few decades--Lyons writes clearly, it's just too many details to repeat. One to note, perhaps, the emergence in 1983 of "The Order" AKA the Aryan Resistance Movement AKA Silent Brotherhood whose activism "brought an organized section of the US right into armed conflict with the state for the first time in over one hundred years."

A new era of far right militant opposition to the state.

TBC