Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity

I don't remember what made me want to read this but I've been interested for a while and finally opened it up and (this may seem counterintutive) checked out the short conclusion. And my jaw dropped. It's a 4 page polemic on how multiculturalism is 1) inherently dangerous and destructive to Good White Nations (general implication) 2) responsible for the rise of neo-nazi groups. He imputes a terrifying level of reasonableness in neo-Nazi views, imo. He attacks affirmative actions for "discriminating against Whites" and complains about white guilt. Try this paragraph on for size:

"But liberal support for affirmative action has gone further in producing a climate of white guilt. The causes of black crime, drug involvement and welfare show more dependence are often sought in white racism. Black on white crime in terms of murder, rape and robbery with violence is many times greater than white on black crime. However, the national media typically highlight instances of white racial attacks, while many reports of black crime are "color- blind”and mostly confined to the local press.The massive overrepresentation of blacks in the penal system, evident testimony of black crime, violence and underperformance are largely ignored by the liberal media, or otherwise invoked as further evidence of black disadvantage and white racism... This disabling of white criticism through accusations of individual and “institutional” racism,coupled with a compensatory attitude toward black identity, has been a further factor in the stimulation of the racist far right."

This is some thoroughly vile shit. In his mythology, racial minorities' struggles for rights is what causes the rise of neo-Nazis and therefore these struggles deserve strong criticism!

"Writing after the First World War, the American racial theorist Lothrop
Stoddard perceived the threat of immigration in both economic terms — forcing down the level of wages—and its cultural consequences, affecting religion, rules of conduct,laws and customs.By 1940—in the middle of the Great Restriction of immigration—Time found it fashionable to mock Stoddard’s fear of the “yellow peril”as a delusion.Nowadays, the same magazine predicts the inevitable eclipse of the white, Western world."

Is he referencing Stoddard *approvingly* here?

There's more along the same lines, although I don't know how much I can quote. To me, it shows strong sympathy with the racial aspect of the neo-Nazi project, which is horrifying. I don't see how I can read the rest of the book without knowing where his views lie. I'm now open to suggestions on books about post WW2 Nazi groups which are written by like you know anti-fascists show less

The death of Nicholas Goodrick-Clark last year (2012) deprived us of an important historian of political irrationalism.

Unlike many others in the field, he neither accepted irrational claims as anything other than fictions nor allowed himself the luxury of huffing and puffing about their presumed evil in a liberal society.

He simply told the story and expressed, with discretion (pages 303-304) legitimate concerns about the course of events if these cruel and stupid irrationalisms had their ground watered for them by our own cultural stubbornness.

He was evidence-based and measured. This got him direct access to some of the key figures who espoused the ideologies covered in this remarkably useful book - political racism, esoteric national show more socialism and white identity politics. What he writes rings true as a result.

The book was written in 2002 and published in 2003 so his death holds the additional tragedy for us that he was never able to bring matters up to date in a Second Edition. His judgments are cautious and wise but he may have revised opinions about a moving political feast.

Each chapter is a fact-based essay in a different aspect of Far Right politics within the West (with only passing reference to other theatres). He begins by covering national socialism (essentially radical extremist conservatism) in the US and the shifting sands of the British Far Right in the face of immigration and multiculturalism.

He then moves on to review the influence of particular Far Right 'intellectuals' - Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey and Savitri Devi (on whom he had already written a book) - before moving on to the post-war construction of an association between the Nazis and the occult.

The next set of sections look at the myth of the esoteric SS, those surrounding Nazi UFOs and other extraterrestrial links and the very peculiar figure of Miguel Serrano who was not alone in merging South Asian ideas with the Nazi mythos.

Goodrick-Clark then reviews the two cultural phenomena of black metal and racist rock music and Nazi satanism and transgressional spirituality before coming full circle and returning to politics.

The book closes with reviews of Christian Identity and its 'allied opposite' racial paganism. The final chapter looks at a cultural phenomenon of considerable importance in the 1990s - the overlap of conspiracy theory, new age cultural pessimism and far right ideology.

What do we learn from all this and how might Goodrick-Clark have adapted his analysis in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Naturally, I cannot speak for him so these are just some lines of thought for others to follow and accept or reject.

The first thing we learn is the startling absurdity of much Far Right thought. We can leave you to read his extended accounts of extremist theory in the book for the evidence of that statement.

Where it is logical, Radical Rightist theory is always based on 'essentialist' philosophical assumptions that bear little scrutiny although they may be no more absurd (just 'nastier' and more anti-social) than other 'spiritual' traditions.

Too often, radical right ideology is simply auto-didactically stupid. Even the most cogent analyses are based on a clear misreading of Nietzsche to the extent that almost every claim to the mantle of Nietszche is, in fact, merely a variation on the 'ressentiment' that the great philosopher excoriated in the desert religions.

Perhaps the only thinker capable of getting beyond absurdity to the first rank was Evola and even he sunk into the sort of mythologising that may have worked in the age of Jung and Spengler but scarcely cuts the mustard today.

But the second thing we learn is that these theories are perhaps intellectually absurd but they represent a genuine political problem that the liberal community has swept under the carpet for far too long.

Even in 2002, there was a growing resentment, which I think had more justification to it than liberals are prepared to admit, that the white working class in general and white males in particular were somehow personally guilty for the crimes of the past.

It would seem that it was convenient for imperialism and capitalism to be expiated by the profiting middle classes through an offering to the gods of political correctness of their own underlings.

Like the Aztecs with bodies, the Western high bourgeoisie has offered a hecatombs of souls in order to rewrite cultural norms in a way that will sustain their power. Of course, the souls they offer are never their own. One class of poor has simply been brought in to replace another as favoured grunts of the system.

We have a combination of invented history, a surge of immigration tolerated by the middle classes to drive down wages and solve the 'servant problem', and active cultural engineering behind affirmative action and multiculturalism.

The result is the growth of a cynical and aggressive political class, an alliance of liberals (social and economic) and block minority votes that has created the atomised and unorganised opposition outlined in this book, waiting for its time in the sun.

American culture knows it has a problem. Compare the world of the X-Files - mass suspicion of Government - with new popular TV series like the Walking Dead, Revolution, Defiance and Falling Skies.

Whether produced by Spielberg or JJ Abrams, the tone is one of liberal fear at complete social breakdown and each series questions how far the liberal is going to have to work with some rough-hewn Okie with a heart of gold if he is going to survive.

It is all subliminal, of course, but it is there. The most intelligent of the liberal elite knows that things have gone too far, wants to step back and include the new excluded but doesn't know how.

Meanwhile, the cult of San Muerte appears in the American prison system and hispanic, black and aryan brotherhoods may find they have more in common with each other than they do with the federal government that posits itself as last line of defence between the 'nice' middle class and brutal chaos. If divide and conquer ends, that class is stuffed.

From being a majority in society in the US, the white working class has felt itself under enormous economic and cultural pressure. The Far Right emerged as the element that said what it was not permitted to say within what amounted, ironically, to a liberal totalitarian culture dominated by the educated.

The educated, of course, are now under their own pressure from the internet. The steady pauperisation of the privileged knowledge worker will be the grand factor underpinning the politics of the first half of this century

The situation is not quite the same in the UK and Europe where the perceived 'threat' is feared rather than actual. It centres perhaps more on the denial of particular national and tribal feeling and the 'unfair' tolerance of alien tribes in the cause of universalism and equality.

But the scale of the potential for the active politics of resentment is probably hidden by the incompetence of the Far Right itself. Its language of national socialism, its thuggery and its intellectual stupidity have all alienated the population at large (which is basically tolerant and decent). It has allowed 'liberal' middle class hegemony a length of life that it probably does not deserve.

Indeed, in the UK, the 'Sun' has probably done more for the survival of liberal democracy in the UK than any single force simply because it articulates national feeling and diffuses the anger. If you want a Rightist revolution in the UK, all you have to do is force the removal of 'Page 3' from the paper and please the tiny minority of religious loons and feministas.

Certainly, the BNP's electoral results were derisory. However, a cynical or inspired person could work through this book, sweep away the nonsense, come up with an inspired radical conservatism that did not mention Hitler, flying saucers or race once (as truly irrelevant) and cause serious problems to the complacent hegemony of the political elite.

Fortunately for liberal democracy, there is not a thinker in this book that 'gets' what is happening. A change is beginning to happen in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis - but not the predicted one.

Career fascists like Griffin are being shunted aside in favour of radical populisms like the Tea Party in the US, UKIP in the UK and Marie Le Pen's second wave National Front in France.

Even Die Linke in Germany is developing a 'German workers first' strategy while the Italian Right and East European populist parties teeter between interwar fascism and bloody-minded populism.

The Far Right has failed simply because it is stupid. The populist Right which treats race as irrelevant but takes culture seriously and emphasises the rights of the individual over the rights of the collective is not.

This shift is recent. The global economic crisis was not something that Goodrick-Clarke was in a position to analyse a decade ago. The conspiracy theory obsessions of the 1990s staggered along through the 2000s but merely made Occupy a laughing stock amongst serious radicals of the Left and Right. A new game is afoot.

The New Age generation of irrational thinkers are moving inexorably towards the grave. Their successors are pragmatists whose prime concern is not maniacal amoral hysterical violence but a cultural resistance that is sustainable and that does not need the nightmare of a strong state.

History has also taught us that Hitler was far less demonic, far less interesting and far more incompetent than the 'romantics' of the second half of the twentieth century had liked to think. He was not the 'avatar' but simply a source of memes for political culture.

The final degeneration of the Nazi cult of Serrano lies in the disappointing Euro-comedy 'Iron Sky' and the far from disappointing use of the meme in films like Hollywood's 'Hell Boy'. Now we can all say with Indiana Jones "Gee, I hate those Nazis" without having someone whisper in our ear that the film was made by the 'Juice'.

The Nazis are now just a blip in history, another cruel and incompetent collectivism. They were in power about the same length of time as Tony Blair, another blip in history. But, and this is the rub, not only were the Nazis cruel and incompetent collectivists, it would seem that liberal democracies have proven to be as well.

States (we refer back to De Jouvenel) have taken to themselves the right to conscript labour (enslave) in peacetime on dubious arguments about citizenship or duty since the time of the Jacobins.

This is what the Nazis did and the liberal democracies also accrued that right to themselves. Even today, when most have given up or suspended that right, the Norwegians now temporarily enslave women on the dubious grounds of 'gender equality'. Hmmmmmmmm!

In other words, much of Goodrick-Clark's book refers to the slow unwinding of a total culture of authoritarian statism of which the ideology Far Right was merely a part. This is not to be complacent. The author refers to Golden Dawn, simply as a journal, once in passing, yet, a decade later, this same organisation received global news coverage as a contender for power in a collapsing Greece.

Only a day or so ago, I noticed the National Anarchists proudly posting on Facebook pictures of their lamp post stickers on the streets of Britain and, only months ago, liberal transhumanists were rightly getting exercised about the infiltration of their cultural movement by new wave fascists.

But in other respects, things are getting better. The correct analysis of the Far Right about the rise of liberal totalitarianism (merely a mirror image of their own aspirations to absolute power) has not resulted in a wider appreciation of various national socialisms but quite the opposite.

The rebellions in the Turkish and Brazilian street are cultural but anti-traditionalist. Military and bureaucratic elites are being asked to intervene to protect private life and individual freedom from authoritarians and communitarians. This would be unthinkable in the West where military and bureaucracy are locked into political correctness on their own account.

Similarly, as noted above, the new populist right is far more ambiguous than earlier versions of the right and, in some respects, it represents a libertarian reaction to the Big State with its public sector and positive discrimination welfarist clientage. Right and Left have partly switched places in a process that started with the Reagan Republicans.

The modern libertarian rightist is more likely to be sex-positive and secularist now - more so than the totalitarian liberal who will crush desire under radical feminist ideology and make contingent alliances with religious groups in order to hold on to an urban power base.

Things are, in short, confused but Far Right essentialism has driven itself into a corner of absurd ideas and its violence and culture of cruelty alienates its own potential base. Nordic Social Democracy was strengthened and not weakened by the insane slaughter of kids in Norway by Breivik. The American security state has been strengthened and not weakened by McVeigh's angry terrorist reaction to the atrocity at Waco.

It is a strong recommendation that you should read this book as contemporary history. In 2002, Goodrick-Clark raised his concerns that the cultural war on one part of the community by another would result in the rise of the Far Right and a form of reaction would set in.

I think he was right about the overall trend but he may have failed to see (simply because a decade is a long time in generational politics) precisely what would happen under the twin pressures of changes in political technology and sustained exposure of the moral turpitude and incompetences of our elites since 2008.

The ability of the mass not to be a 'herd' (as in the ideology of many of the frustrated activists in the book) but a wise crowd of individuals empowered by technology and interest is simply not in the mental tool box of resentful working class and declasse petit bourgeois authoritarians.

The paradox is that the hegemony of the liberal elite is coming to an end. This is why they are intensifying their attack with a range of tools such as porn filters and mass surveillance. But this is not to the benefit of either the authoritarian Right or the loons of Occupy.

Something new is stirring - a revolutionary moment perhaps where flawed 'saints' like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning sit alongside cheeky chappies like Nigel Farage and Berlusconi and doctors and market traders in Tunis, Cairo and Istanbul.

Above all, the age of identity politics is coming to an end - we are complex persons with private lives and not merely things defined by our race, our gender, our jobs or our sexual orientation.

This book is, therefore, a vital introduction to an insane but oddly legitimate protest on its own terms to liberal totalitarianism. It is a profoundly wrong and ignorant revolt but its right to revolt must be recognised. This will be uncomfortable to left-liberals but they are creating their own nemesis if they continue along their current path.

Fascist identity politics is simply the shadow side of the identity politics that has infected Western civilisation since the 1960s from the Left. Remove the identity politics of the hegemonic post-Marxist Left and fascist identity politics will die with it. Remove the clinical managerialism and 'federal bureaucratism' of liberal totalitarian thought and esoteric Nazi cults and New Age cultural pessimism will also disappear.

The Nazis are not the problem - they are noisy, nasty but tiny - we are the problem. show less

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (1953-2012) was the author of The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985), which is perhaps still the foremost scholarly monograph on its topic. In his 2002 book Black Sun, he followed up by exploring the various religious and quasi-religious strains for whom Hitler is an age-defining hero or "avatar" and Nazi Germany is illud tempus, and who aspire to perpetuate or fulfill what they see as the resulting "Aryan" spiritual legacy. Unfortunately, this 15-year-old book is a timely read for Americans today.

The first two chapters detail the presence and development of avowed neo-Nazi political leaders and organizations in the Anglophone world in the twentieth century. These capable overviews primarily serve as a backdrop for show more later chapters. About a third of the book consists of examinations of individual figures -- mostly non-Anglophone -- who have acquired a teaching mystique in latter-day fascist circles. (As Goodrick-Clarke puts it, their writings have "become hot tips" among neo-Nazis.) These include Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Wilhelm Landig, and Miguel Serrano. Each of these chapters is substantial and supplies a useful brief on both the biography and doctrines of the mystagogue in question.

Chapter 6, on "The Nazi Mysteries," is a study and synopsis of the sort of "alternative history" and credulous conspiracy-mongering involved with the attribution of occult powers and motives to Hitler, Nazism, and the SS, which began in literature for popular audiences in the 1960s and became a cottage industry in the 70s and 80s. I imagine that this chapter was one of the most satisfying for Goodrick-Clarke to write, given that he was already in a sort of implicit dialogue with this literature from his doctoral dissertation onward, and that his most successful book has often been shelved alongside it. Here, he gets to confront and call out directly the falsifications and errors of such writers as Hermann Rauschning (Hitler Speaks), Pauwels and Bergier (The Morning of the Magicians), Trevor Ravenscroft (The Spear of Destiny), and others. This sort of study continues in Chapter 8, where the scope of the "mysteries" expands with the addition of UFOs and exotic Nazi redoubts in South America and Antarctica and on other planets.

The chapter on "White Noise and Black Metal" is a treatment of white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies in youth subcultures and music. Its information on skinhead organizing and pro-racist music labels is well considered and clear. The presentation of black metal is a bit muddled, though, implicitly suggesting more uniform Nazi sympathies in the international black metal scene than a more objective account might find. In his recounting of the Columbine High School massacre, Goodrick-Clarke propagates misinformation about the "Trenchcoat Mafia" that was common to the early reporting on the topic, thus falsely transmuting the Hitler fetish of Eric Harris into the preoccupation of a clique to which he did not even belong. (For corrections on this score, see Dave Cullen's Columbine.)

There are similar strengths and weaknesses in the chapter on "Nazi Satanism and the New Aeon." While reasonably noting Aleister Crowley's writings as being readable for "authoritarian and illiberal doctrine" (213), Goodrick-Clarke actually misses the extent to which they supply the locus classicus of the phrase "New Aeon" in occultist discourse. He mentions Crowley's membership in Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), characterizing it as "a fringe Masonic organization in Germany," but omits to observe that it (along with conventional Freemasonry) was banned by the Nazis, with OTO's German leader of the time arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp for his association with Crowley. Goodrick-Clarke instances the enthusiastic Nazi partisanship of Crowley disciple Martha Künzel, but overlooks Crowley's own occult activism against Germany during World War II.

He does not in any way mention the later survival of the magical orders actually headed by Aleister Crowley (OTO and A.'.A.'.), which is fitting, since these are vehicles of neither neo-Nazi nor esoteric white supremacist doctrine. Crowley in fact boasted himself to be "the leader of the Extreme Left in the Council-Chamber of the City of the Pyramids" (Magick Without Tears, Ch. 13). There has however been substantial posthumous misuse of Crowley's work by neo-Nazis and their ilk, much of which is documented here by Goodrick-Clarke. With the heightened visibility of US far-right groups in the "Age of Trump," it has become necessary for OTO to inoculate itself against misrepresentations on this score, with a public statement by relevant authorities to affirm the Order's basic anti-racist philosophy, already reflected in administrative policy. (There were also remarks from the US Grand Master to this effect in 2015.)

After a brief, competent treatment of the early Church of Satan in the United States to accurately appraise their "experiments in exploiting the shock value of Nazism" (215), Goodrick-Clarke offers longer studies of the Order of the Nine Angles (ONA) and Order of the Jarls of Baelder (OJB) and their organizers. (He associates the "New Aeon" especially with the ONA.) For these relatively recent instances of "pagan-satanic movement[s] on the British far right," as well as New Zealander Kerry Bolton's comparable Ordo Sinistra Vivendi (OSV), Goodrick-Clarke's accounts are the most detailed and credible that I have to hand. He concludes that while constituting "the most extreme example of the cultic revival of fascism," these groups "actively embrace their own marginalization" through emphases on elitism and transgression (231).

Goodrick-Clarke's survey continues by examining newer American white supremacist and Aryanist groups with attention to their religious doctrines. He provides a characterization and history of Christian Identity with its genealogy in British-Israelism, as well as a discussion of the World Church of the Creator and its anti-Christian racist tenets. He identifies these groups as potential "incubators" for a more widespread "white racial movement" (255-56), seeing them as thus comparable to the pre-Nazi Ariosophists he treated in The Occult Roots of Nazism. He also finds contemporary parallels to the formative culture of Nazism in right-wing Odinist neopaganism, exemplified by the Wotansfolk of David Lane and Ron McVan. (Goodrick-Clarke does note the diversity of Nordic neopaganism, with schisms attributable to differences regarding racism.)

"Conspiracy Beliefs and the New World Order" summarizes the conspiracy paranoia of the far-right militia movement in the 1990s. It also devotes a considerable amount of attention to the ways in which traditionally anti-Semitic and anti-"Illuminati" conspiracy theories have been propagated in New Age media and milieux, with examples such as David Icke. While admitting that "As yet, the New Age has little room for Hitler worship or Nazi UFOs," Goodrick-Clarke considers the social pessimism of much turn-of-the-millennium post-New Age "alternative" culture to be akin to the "Manichean dualism" historically implicated in anti-Semitic movements. Again, he suggests parallels with pre-Nazi German culture.

Necessarily missing from this book are significant changes in white supremacist organizing in the US since the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Such groups were arguably instrumental in the election of Donald Trump, whose most visible political activity in the 21st century had been as a mouthpiece of the racist-nativist "birther" movement disputing Obama's eligibility for the presidency. Researchers agree that there has been a tremendous upswing in American far-right and racist groups, with greater exposure for eliminationist rhetoric. I am not familiar with any investigations that would help evaluate Goodrick-Clarke's prognostications about the influence of the groups in this book on that growth, but the knowledge he supplies may be important in assessing more recent developments.

For three hundred pages, I understood Black Sun to be detailing the perspectives and motivations of neo-Nazi cultists without advocating or apologizing for them. Alas, that perception was significantly eroded by Goodrick-Clarke's four-page "Conclusion." When mentioning institutional racism, he puts "institutional" in scare quotes, as if the concept were a figment of the liberal imagination. Correctly noting the perceived tension between popular notions of individual rights and efforts to remedy legacies of racism, he accepts racist framings with such declarations as: "The comparative high performance of Asian minorities in education and employment, and their underrepresentation in prison statistics, demonstrate the untenability of attributing black failure to white racism" (304). I hope readers will appreciate the extent to which the foregoing sentence serves to indict Goodrick-Clarke's own racism, rather than to exonerate that of the subjects of his study. Nevertheless, the book is a valuable one with a wealth of information, and the author's final worry for the resilience of modern multi-ethnic societies is not misplaced. show less

There are people out there that believe some odd things, including that there is a Nazi base in Antarctica, Jews are evil, whites are superior to all other people, and so on. Goodrick-Clarke mixes all these odd people and ideas in together and tries to show links between them all.

With all the different groups, political parties and acronyms, "Black Sun" can be very difficult to follow at times, and Goodrick-Clarke doesn't do the poor reader any favours with many an impenetrable sentence littered throughout the book. However, any book where Aleister Crowley comes out looking like one of the lesser wankers going around is an impressive feat. One to read with Wikipedia on hand.

In Black Sun, Goodrick-Clarke comprehensively reviews the post-war Neo-Nazi movement ranging from Miguel Serrano's Esoteric Hitlerism to Nordic racial paganism and how modern conspiracy theorists link in with the far-right's pathological mistrust of government and society.

Goodrick-Clarke covers a wealth of topics, some of which are lesser known (such as Savitri Devi and her Hitler avatar) but each one is covered in detail and altogether, he paints a frightening picture of an ideology that rather than dying as it should have in the Führerbunker along with Hitler himself, instead continues to grow and peddle its anti-Semitic, racist doctrine across Europe and North America.

It is an extremely interesting book but perhaps suffers from its show more source material - it is not something that can be read quickly or lightly but must be read in detail so that a fuller picture of the movement can be understood. show less