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INTERSECTIONAL HATE: RACE, GENDER AND VIOLENCE ON THE TRANSATLANTIC EXTREME-RIGHT, 1969-2009

A dissertation presented

By

Simon A. Purdue

To The Department of History

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the field of

World History

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2021

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INTERSECTIONAL HATE: RACE, GENDER AND VIOLENCE ON THE TRANSATLANTIC EXTREME-RIGHT, 1969-2009

A dissertation presented

By

Simon A. Purdue

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

To The Department of History

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in World History in the College of Social Science and the Humanities of Northeastern University April 2021

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Abstract

This dissertation seeks to get to the core of the racist extremist social structure, focusing on the intimate and personal of the movement and shifting our understanding of the neo-fascist weltanschauung on a global level. I explore the social, political and ideological motivators that drive people towards the extreme-right and ultimately dictate their actions and beliefs once they are firmly within the movement, and my research highlights important trends and patterns that can have real-world impacts. For example, by exploring the intricacies of far-right masculinities in historical context we can determine key factors contributing to towards violence, and can isolate particular warning signs that may be of great use to the professional

Countering Violent (CVE) community. This dissertation is highly interdisciplinary and bridges the gap between academia and an important nexus of policy, violence prevention, and security.

My dissertation research has explored the intersection between race and gender on the global extreme-right between 1969 and 2009. By examining the publications of violent extremist groups in the United States and United Kingdom, I offer a transatlantic historical analysis of the ways in which gender was constructed and defined on the extremist fringe. I explore the ways in which group leadership defined the identity of White femininity in opposition to White masculinity, and how Black and Jewish masculinity was constructed as a direct threat to White womanhood by members of these groups. Ultimately I argue that these writers and activists mobilized idealized images of both masculinity and femininity as both propaganda and as a deliberate limitation on the role of women within their movement. These groups promoted an

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image of a morally pure, dutiful mother in order to portray women as potential victims – thereby justifying retributive and pre-emptive violence - and to limit their engagement to reproduction and home-making. However, by incorporating the writing of women within the movement and looking at the many magazines and newsletters published and distributed by groups such as the

Women’s Union and Patriotic Women’s Front, I suggest that more often than not women within racist extremism rejected these restrictions and engaged in more direct activism through publishing, organizing, network-building and even violence. In doing so, white supremacist women were able to forge their own paths within the movement, often reaching senior positions and gaining significant degrees of influence in their extremist circles. Despite male activists’ attempts to circumscribe it, I show, women’ racist activism has and continues to be both significant and dangerous.

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Dedicated to the activists and anti-fascists who put themselves in danger on a daily basis to

counter and combat the rising tide of hatred around the world. Despite the constant threat of doxxing, harassment, abuse and even deadly violence, they hold fast as the first and last line of

defense against violent racist extremism. Their work too often goes unnoticed and even

persecuted, and we owe them a great deal of gratitude.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 7

Introduction 13

Chapter 1

‘A battle of the groin’: The Reproductive Politics of the Global Extreme-Right, 1969-2009 35

Chapter 2

A New Homo-Fascistus?: Male Fundamentalism, Martial Masculinity, and Extreme-Right Visions of Modern Manhood 76

Chapter 3

“Tomorrow Belongs to Her”: Women’s Violent Activism on the Extreme-Right 116

Chapter 4

Useful Victims: Symbolic Rage and Racist Violence on the Global Extreme-Right 145

Epilogue – Making A Martyr 176

Bibliography 182

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the product of five years of constant learning and both personal and professional growth, and it would not have been possible if it were not for all the people who offered their help, support and expertise throughout the process. From those who helped me shape the topic and refine my research skills, to those who helped me weather the rough seas of life as an underpaid and overworked PhD student, I have made it this far on the backs of others, and I am eternally grateful.

Firstly, I would like to thank Gretchen Heefner, who bravely took me on as her first PhD student three years ago and who helped me shape this project from its nascent stages. Gretchen’s insight, patience, advice, and feedback were invaluable as this project evolved from a loose concept into the manuscript you now hold. Her emphasis on story-telling and a compelling narrative helped transform this piece into something much more readable than it otherwise would have been, and her willingness to pull me out of the clouds of high theory kept both me and this project grounded throughout. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Timothy

Brown and Heather Streets-Salter. Both Tim and Heather have been immensely helpful throughout my graduate career, guiding me through my comprehensive exams and offering valuable insight as I formulated my research topic. Furthermore, Tim and Heather have both given their time and energy in guiding me through publishing, the academy, and the job search, and have offered their support and practical help in difficult times.

Thank you also to the other current and former faculty in the history department at Northeastern who have helped me develop my research and teaching skills over the last five years, and who

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have always been willing to have a chat about my research when I needed to talk it through. In particular I would like to thank Tom Havens, Phillip Thai, Laura Frader, Victoria Cain,

Christopher Parsons, Marty Blatt and Harlow Robinson. I would also like to thank Suzanna

Walters and Miranda Outman for the help they offered during my time working for Signs and

Moya Bailey for her advice and assistance while I worked on the #Hashtag Activism project.

Thanks must also go to Richard Freeland, who kindly offered me work when I needed it and who has been a constant of support since my first year at Northeastern. Special thanks is also due to the administrative staff in the history department, specifically Bonne and Kirsten who have always been there to offer their advice or help even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I owe a great deal of gratitude to the fellow graduate students and early career scholars who have helped me through the last five years. In particular, I would like to thank the graduate students who I worked with during my time at Northeastern, all of whom have been a source of great joy even through the most stressful and difficult portions of the PhD. My cohort of Luke Scalone,

Will Whitworth and Allison Chapin have been there since the days of Monday night trivia, and we have gone through this process together the whole way. Jamie Parker and Matt Bowser offered their mentorship in my first semester, and their friendship ever since. Special thanks must also go to my officemates over the last five years – Dave DeCamp, Olivier Schouteden, and

Adam Tomasi – who have put up with the ranting, the muttering, the constant meetings, and the ever-present smell of coffee. To all those who helped me refine my topic, gave me a platform to talk about my work, and offered their insights into the various issues I grappled with over the last five years, you have made me the scholar I am today, and without you this project would be a

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shadow of what it is now. Specifically I would like to thank James Robinson, Malcolm Purinton,

Caroline Klibanoff, Kara Zelasko, Bridget Keown, Thanasis Kinias, and Aaron Peterka, all of whom have offered their invaluable advice and support over the last five years. I would also like to thank the folks at both the Centre for Analysis of the and the Institute for

Research on Male who have offered expertise, insight, and opportunities to publish my thoughts. I would like to specifically thank the folks in the CARR Gender Research Unit, all of whom have been a source of encouragement and inspiration.

Thanks must also go to the undergraduate students who took my class on the global far-right in

2019 and 2020. Together we unpacked the ever-evolving landscape of far-right ideology, culture and violence, and the final essays were some of the best I have ever read. Their insight, intelligence and desire to learn drove me to be the best teacher I could be, and I can honestly say that my students had a major impact on my own research. It was a privilege to teach every single one of them.

I would like to give a special mention to Steve and all the former staff at Punter’s on Huntington

Avenue. The grimy tables, the shower gel where soap should have been in the bathrooms, the $9 pitchers. All of it came together to create a place packed with good memories, and not a Friday night on campus goes by in which I don’t wish I could go back. Punter’s was more than just a pub, it was a place to grade papers, a sanctuary away from the stress of the office, a place where good friends were only a text-message away, even a public history project. Northeastern simply has not been the same since it closed two years ago.

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Particular gratitude is due to the funding bodies, archival staff, administrators and conference organizers, without who this project could not have been completed. Thanks to the staff at the

University of Cape Town archives and special collections, the South African national archives in

Cape Town, the South Africa History Archive, and the Brown University Library, all of whom were very helpful as I spent countless hours trawling through their respective collections. I owe particular gratitude also to Daniel Jones at the University of Northampton, whose expertise on the Searchlight collection and willingness to offer help and information went above and beyond what one could hope to expect from an archivist-scholar. A special mention must also go to the staff at Tulane University Archives and Special Collections, specifically Lori Schexnayder, who went out of her way to get documents scanned and sent to me in the midst of the COVID-19 shutdown.

Similarly, a special mention must also go to all the staff at the University of Oregon Archives and Special Collections, specifically Linda Long, Lauren Goss, and the James Ingebretsen

Memorial Fund selection committee. It was with great honor that I received the Ingebretsen

Award, and my only regret was that I was prevented from making full use of the funds by the

COVID pandemic. I must thank Linda and Lauren for their willingness to scan documents and send them digitally, as without their help this dissertation would not nearly be complete.

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I would also like to thank the folks at the Brudnick Center for Research on Conflict and Violence for funding my research. Specifically, I would like to thank Tracy Johniken and Gordana

Rabrenovic, both of whom were immensely helpful throughout the application and award processes. I also owe gratitude to the Gillis Family Fund for their generous support of my research, and to the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Department of History at

Northeastern, both of whom awarded me generous research funding over the last five years. In addition I would like to thank the American Historical Association for awarding me the 2020

Albert J. Beveridge Research Award, and to the Centre for Gender Research at the University of

Oslo for offering me a visiting scholarship – an offer which I sadly could not take up due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gratitude is owed to all the organizations which made research and conference travel easier with their generous support, including the Organization of American Historians, the Social History

Society, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the National Science

Foundation. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to the organizing staff of the 2019 International

Symposium on Radicalization and Extremism for their generous support and for a wonderful conference at which my research project was honed through conversations with great scholars and practitioners with various fascinating backgrounds, specifically Sammy Rangel, Frank

Meeink and Jeff Schoep.

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Special recognition must go to my family, who have been a steady source of support for me not only over the last five years, but throughout my entire life. Thank you for being there for me and encouraging me through my academic career, and for always helping me through even the most difficult situations. Thank you to my mother for offering her academic expertise and proof- reading almost everything I have written since undergrad. Thank you to my father for talking me through the logistics of applications, visas, finances and more. Thank you to my brother, Tim, for helping me unwind with a chat and some videogames or a game of chess when I need it the most, and thank you to my sister, Rachel, for being my unpaid and overworked therapist any time we’re both at home. You have all made me the man and the scholar I am today, and I am immensely grateful. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to Lily, whose unconditional love has powered me through the toughest times, to Fergus, whose interminable energy is an inspiration, and to Twix and Raffers, both of whom are greatly missed.

Finally, thank you to my partner, Loren. She has been there for me through the entire research and writing process, and has dealt with the very worst moments of frustration and the very best moments of inspiration. She has offered consolation and support in times of stress and sadness, and encouragement and congratulations in times of success. Loren, thank you for your love, your support, your patience and your kindness, and thank you for being there through all the challenges of the last two and a half years. I can honestly say I would not have finished this dissertation without you, thank you.

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Introduction

“For the , it’s the first line of attack. For the far-right, it’s a component piece of racial strategy. For all sectors of wing, the “woman question” is a key to all the right wing attempts to redefine the ethos of U.S. citizens” – Women, New Right vs. Far-Right1

“The U.S. Right is made up of frustrated men, men who are afraid of this or that or the other and seek the company of others who are similarly frustrated, in order to be able to ease their angst and perhaps work out some of their fantasies” – , Siege2

At 1am on the fourth of March, 1968, a soon-to-be-married couple approached an altar. The altar at which they would be married was not adorned with a cross, flowers, a or indeed anything which would inform the casual observer that this was a wedding. Rather, this altar was adorned with Nordic , SS runes, and a replica Nazi eagle. Donald Mudie and Pearl Barnes were no ordinary couple. They were the Volsüng Officer and Lady Officer of the National Socialist

Group, a violent cell of hardened racist extremists who plotted large scale terror attacks and held dreams of bringing about a global Fourth Reich from their Grimsby cul-de-sac.3 Signing their

National Socialist Group-issued wedding certificate with a “ritually mixed” mark of blood, wine and charcoal, they swore allegiance to each other, to Hitler, and to the White race.4 Their marriage before the was starkly symbolic, representing the centrality of gender to the racist activism and violence to the extreme-right fringe, and embodying the sanctified White couple which was at the symbolic core of the racist-extremist worldview.

1 Draft of Women: New Right vs. Far-Right, National Socialist Group Papers, University of Northampton Archives and Special Collections, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01. 2 James Mason, Siege, SolarGeneral Publishing, 1983. 3 Certificate of Marriage between Donald Mudie and Pearl Barnes, 1968, National Socialist Group Papers, University of Northampton Archives and Special Collections, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01. 4 Certificate of Marriage between Donald Mudie and Pearl Barnes.

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That same fringe is seeing a violent renaissance in the 21st Century. However, they are no longer covertly gathering in the early hours of the morning but instead proudly taking center stage.

Since the shocking scenes of tiki torch-wielding racists chanting “Jews will not replace us” at the

Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the racist political extreme has emerged from the shadows emboldened and empowered by the new atmosphere of intolerance that has swept the country.5 This came to a head in January 2021, when thousands of QAnon adherents, Trump supporters and militiamen stormed the United States Capitol building in an unprecedented far- right insurrection, resulting in the deaths of four rioters and one Capitol police officer.

Meanwhile the violent, accelerationist right has been gaining newfound infamy and publicity, spurred on by the rightwing counter-reaction to the protests which swept the nation in the summer of 2020. Groups such as , The Base, the National

Socialist Order, and the have co-opted the atmosphere of revolution and pushed their own hateful, violent agenda aimed at bringing about a second or the total dissolution of democratic society.6 Across the Atlantic, Europe has seen a steady rise in far-right political power since the economic crash of 2008, and it has been accompanied by a growth in the size and number of organized racist groups, and an increasingly vocal and violent extremist fringe. However, while the rise of the far-right feels very present in 2021, and seems almost

5 Rodney A. Smolla, Confessions of a Free Speech lawyer: Charlottesville and the Politics of Hate, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 6 ‘’ refers to an ideology which promotes random acts of violence, and sabotage in order to weaken public trust in the systems of government and deepen societal schisms, ultimately leading to the collapse of modern society, opening space for the emergence of a totalitarian, fascist regime in its place. The foremost proponent of rightwing accelerationist ideology is James Mason, the neo-Nazi author of Siege, a manual for rightwing terrorist action that has become a of the accelerationist right. The ‘Boogaloo’ movement refers to an ideology that began life as a meme on and 8kun towards the end of 2019. The term comes from the original long-form meme, ‘Civil War 2: American Boogaloo’, a play on the title of the 1984 , ‘Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo’. Adherents to Boogaloo ideology promote the use of random violence to bring about a second civil war and ultimately the overthrow of the United States government. The movement is ideologically aligned with the anarcho-capitalist and ultra-libertarian movement, and has ties to the Sovereign Citizen and anti-government right.

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symptomatic of an increasingly polarized and violent 21st Century, the groundwork for the current resurgence of fascist ideas has been steadily laid over the course of the past fifty years.

With the United States acting as a globalizing nexus of hate, groups and individuals on the extreme-right have been strategizing, radicalizing and disseminating propaganda for decades, and the current mainstreaming of far-right ideas and tactics is the product of years of planning and organizing in the extremist sphere.

“Intersectional Hate” seeks to understand the roots of these movements by focusing on the intimate and personal politics of specific extreme right groups as they mobilized in the United

States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere between 1969 and 2009. The nature of rightwing extremism is such that the landscape of the subculture is constantly evolving as groups succumb to infighting, proscription, and ideological metamorphosis, and as such it is necessary to cast a wide net and incorporate a variety of specific groups throughout the course of this study. These groups are bound by ideology and activism primarily adhering to neo-Nazi, fascist or rightwing accelerationist ideologies.7 The groups addressed in this study include the National Socialist

Liberation Front, and various groups in the United States, and the , National Front, English and National Socialist

Group in the United Kingdom. The majority of these groups and movements modelled their ideology and activism on Hitler’s pre-war program in Germany, following a dual-power model

7 For an overview of the ideological underpinnings of post-war see Carl Müller Frølund, Understanding Nazi Ideology: The Genesis and Impact of a Political Faith, (trans. John Irons), Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2020; Alexander J. Carter, Cumulative Extremism: A Comparative Historical Analysis, : Routledge, 2019; Phillip W. Gray, Vanguardism: Ideology and Organization in Totalitarian Politics, London: Routledge, 2019; Mark Sedgewick (ed.), Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019; Ronald Beiner, Dangerous : Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; J.M. Berger, Extremism, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.

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of paramilitary violence and metapolitical engagement, centering the narrative of victimhood and retributive violence. Indeed, these groups adopted violence as their primary mode of activism, whether it be physical violence or rhetorical assaults on communities of color, women, the

LGBTQ community, and reproductive health facilities among other targets. While not all of the groups in this study advocated for terrorist violence against innocent populations or critical infrastructure, many surreptitiously promoted stochastic acts of chaotic violence such as mass shootings or sabotage through a process of directed self-radicalization. All of these groups, movements, and ideologies were bound by their disdain for the liberal democratic system, their overt , , and bigotry, and their ultimate desire to impose an authoritarian, white-dominated system that violently persecuted any resistance. I explore the social, political and ideological motivators that have driven people towards the extreme-right and ultimately dictate their actions and beliefs once they are firmly within the movement. This dissertation explores the intersection of identity and violence, specifically looking at the theoretical construction of gender and the practical role of activist men and women in the global extreme-right between 1969 and 2009. In the context of rising violent in the

United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, the United States, India and Russia, this transnational history of racist extremist movements will offer a very necessary glimpse into the inner workings of organized hate and the ideological and organizational roots of our current moment. By exposing the gendered foundations of global racist extremism this project will make a new and very necessary intervention in the field of far-right studies, shedding new light on the shadowy corners of the political spectrum and ultimately opening new avenues for countering hate on the personal, political and academic level. This dissertation will offer historical context to the current

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social and political moment in which white supremacist and far-right terror presents a very immediate threat to security and stability both in the United States and around the world.

The case studies at the center of this project have been chosen both for their unique placement within the global white supremacist movement, and for their unique social and cultural contexts.

North America, and specifically the United States, has acted as the cultural epicenter of global racism over the last sixty years, and has been the source of much of the racist literature that was disseminated globally during that period.8 As the conceptual and administrative home of the

World Union of National Socialists, the avowedly neo-Nazi group established by William L.

Pierce, the US drove the global turn of racist extremism and acted as a nexus for the conception and dissemination of modern far-right ideology. As such, the writings of male American activists were hugely influential on a global scale and were distributed among members of groups in both

South Africa and the United Kingdom, largely setting the pace for the prescription of idealized visions of femininity. However, in turn, female activists seeking to break down these restrictive

8 The corpus of work on the American far-right, and more specifically the extreme-right, is extensive. Recent work on the modern American violent right includes Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire, Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2018; Matt Kennard, Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals To Fight the War on Terror, London: Verso, 2015; Alexandra Minna Stern, and the : How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, Boston: Beacon Press, 2019; Arlie Perliger, American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020; David Niewert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, London: Verso, 2017; Sam Jackson, Oath Keepers: and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020; Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik, Alt- Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White, Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. The literature on women’s engagement with conservative politics in the United States has also been influential in building this dissertation. A number of historians have explored the ways in which activist women have mobilized tropes and stereotypes of femininity as a means of gaining political influence, capitalizing upon the lionization of motherhood and femininity on even the moderate right. These include Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: and From Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right, Chapel Hill: University of Press, 2006; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015; Emily Suzanne Johnson, This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New , New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

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boundaries of activism utilized the same global distribution network, spurring on the global trend towards more explicit women’s activism.

The United Kingdom plays a key role in this study due to the unique factors driving the extreme- right in that context, and the prolific publishing habits of even the smallest radical groups.9 In

Britain the process of post-colonial migration from both the Caribbean and South Asia was seized upon by extreme-right activists, who mobilized the fear of cultural and demographic replacement to increase recruitment. As such, female activists became symbolically very important to the leadership of groups such as the British Movement and National Front, and utilized this rhetorical authority to climb the ranks and achieve significant positions of influence within previously male-dominated groups. Individuals such as Françoise Dior and Pearl Mudie became key figures in the extremist movement, defying previous assumptions that violent activism was a solely masculine sphere. Furthermore, even the smallest groups in Britain

9 The extreme-right in post-war Britain has seen significant scholarly attention in recent years. This work includes Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme-Right, London: Routledge, 2020; Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds.), Tomorrow Belongs to Us: The British Far-Right Since 1967, London: Routledge, 2018; Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far-Right, London: Verso, 2012; Joe Mulhall, After : From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots, London: Routledge, 2020; Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020; Paul Stocker, Lost Imperium: Far-Right Visions of the British Empire, c. 1920- 1980, London: Routledge, 2020; Wendy Laverick and Peter Joyce, Racial and Religious Hate Crime: The UK From 1945 to Brexit, Cham (CH): Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Luke LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933-1973, London: Routledge, 2019; James Loughlin, Fascism and Constitutional Conflict: the British Extreme Right and Ulster in the Twentieth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019; Nick Brooke, Terrorism and in the United Kingdom: The Absence of Noise, Cham (CH): Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; Shirin Hirsch, In the Shadow of : Race, Locality and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018; Richard Griffiths, What Did you Do During the War?: The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-1945, Abingdon: Routledge, 2017; Paul Jackson, and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017; John E. Richardson, British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis, Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2017; Ryan Shaffer, Music, youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism, Cham (CH): Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; Hilary Pilkington, Loud and Proud: Passion and politics in the , Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016; Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson (eds.), Cultures of Post-War British Fascism, New York: Routledge, 2015; Nick Toczek, Haters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators: Anti-Semitism and the UK Far-Right, London: Routledge, 2015.

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published weekly or monthly newsletters and propaganda leaflets, leaving behind a long paper trail which has yet to be seriously analyzed at an academic level.

The sources I use for the purposes of this dissertation are primarily the publications of the racist extremist groups in question. I utilize newsletters, internal and external correspondence, propaganda, and bureaucratic documentation from groups in both the United States and United

Kingdom, as these documents offer an inside perspective into the mindset and inner workings of racist extremism. In addition, I use the publications of antifascist, anti-racist and counter- extremist groups who have monitored violent extremist groups in the United States and United

Kingdom since the 1960s. These organizations include the Southern Poverty Law Center,

Searchlight, the Anti-Defamation League and more recently Hope Not Hate. Through intense research, active engagement with former extremists, and even infiltration of extremist groups, these organizations have gained unparalleled access to the racist extremist sphere, producing extensive reports and investigations which have been vital in the production of this project.

Finally, the work of journalists covering far-right movements throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first has been valuable in gaining insight into the perception of far-right extremist groups in mainstream society and the impact that racist extremism had on communities in both the UK and USA. The majority of sources used in the course of this project were found at university archives, including the University of

Northampton, Tulane University, the University of Oregon, and Brown University.

It is true of any academic study that language is important. However it is especially important when dealing with a movement and milieu that see language as a weapon in an ongoing

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metapolitical ‘culture war’.10 Language and framing is and always has been vitally important to the modern far-right, and the terms that they use and that we as scholars – and indeed as a society

– use to describe them carry a significant amount of symbolic weight. For example, in this project I choose not to uncritically use the term ‘alt-right’, as this is a term which the far-right have self-propagated in order to rebrand themselves as slick, modern and ‘hipster’, in order to ultimately shake the negative baggage carried by ‘’ or ‘’.

While some scholars do find the term useful for categorizing the recent reformulation of far-right politics and activism, I will not use the term except when absolutely necessary, as I believe to do so is to approach the study of racist extremism on racist extremists’ terms. Similarly, I have taken the decision to redact the words of racist extremists in some cases. It is a sad reality that the individuals this project deals with regularly and deliberately use offensive slurs to demean and degrade people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ folks, women, and the differently abled.

However as a researcher I can choose what to amplify and what not to. Simply repeating the words which racist extremists have imbued with such power not only extends the harm that they cause, but limits the accessibility of this work. Including unredacted slurs in academic work can prevent marginalized individuals and those living with the very real trauma of identity-based abuse from accessing work on the far-right, and thus only serves to contribute to the overwhelming homogeneity of the academic field. As such I have taken care to use asterisks in cases in which slurs are used, and it should be assumed that any censorship is my own unless stated otherwise.

10 Talia Lavin, : My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, London: Monoray, 2020.

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Similarly, it is important to be careful with language when defining the movement itself. This dissertation examines extreme right groups in the United Kingdom and United States. While many political scientists, sociologists and historians use the terms far-right, radical right and extreme right interchangeably, for the purpose of this study it will be important to note the subtle but critical differences between these definitions. While the term ‘far-right’ does relate to the subjects of this dissertation, I find it too broad a category for a study this specific. The term ‘far- right’ has come to incorporate many of the democratic political parties of Europe and certain factions of the Republican Party in the United States, which represent an iteration of the very establishment against which my subjects consistently rail. Political Scientist Cas Mudde defines these groups under the banner of ‘radical right’, that is the faction of far-right ideology that seeks to use democratic processes in order to advance ethno-centric, fundamentalist and populist political agendas. The radical right includes parties such as the Front Nationale in France and

Alternativ fur Deutschland in Germany, as well as individual actors such as Donald Trump and

Stephen Miller in the United States. In contrast Mudde argues that the ‘extreme right’ (or extremist right) is explicitly anti-democratic and subscribes to the autocratic, Nazi-inspired ideas of the Führerprinzip.11 This style of far-right politics is fundamentally revolutionary and lends itself to a more violent, militia-based style of political activism. While the ‘membership’ of the radical right is growing hugely around the world and finds itself entering the political

11 The führerprinzip was a model of leadership and political activism described by Hitler in . It is widely accepted as the archetypical model for modern fascist organizing, and is fundamentally authoritarian in nature. In Mein Kampf Hitler stated that “the strength of a political party lies by no means in the greatest possible independent intellect of the individual members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow the intellectual leadership. The decisive factor is the leadership itself… Only those should rule who have the natural temperament and gifts of leadership… the strength of a political party never consists in the intelligence and independent spirit of the rank-and-file of its members but rather in the spirit of willing obedience with which they follow their intellectual leaders ". It is this emphasis on full ideological reliance on intellectual and political leaders that defined the structure of the in Germany and defines, according to Mudde, the extreme-right today; . Mein Kampf, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

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mainstream, the extremist right remains a small but dangerous force that continues to lie at the fringes of society. The various organizations and movements I study in this piece all lie on these fringes, thus I will be using the term ‘extreme right’ to refer to the explicitly violent and revolutionary movements that this dissertation explores.12

Central to this project is the idea of gender. It is widely accepted that gender is an expression of self and of identity, and is defined not by biology but by social hegemony.13 It encompasses multiple femininities and masculinities, as well as androgynous identities that do not fulfil traditional social expectations of the performance of gender. However, individuals aligned with the extreme-right saw gender as a strict binary in which gender and biological sex are inseparable and ultimately the same thing, leading to a very strictly defined, single model of both femininity and masculinity, with nothing in between. The understanding of gender within the milieu that this project explores is fundamentally rooted in cis-normative, heteronormative position. Thus when I talk about gender in this piece – unless explicitly stated otherwise – I am

12 Cas Mudde, The Far Right in America, New York: Routledge, 2018. 13 For work on the social construction of gender see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999; Judith Lorber and S. A. Farrell (eds.), The Social Construction of Gender, New York: Sage Publications, 1991; Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree, Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014; Lisa Wade with Douglas Hartmann and Christopher Uggen (eds.), Assigned: Life with Gender, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2017; Linda L. Lindsey, Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective, 6th Edition, New York: Routledge, 2014; Kay Bussey, ‘Gender Identity Development’ in Seth J. Schwartz, Koen Luyckx and Vivian L. Vignoles (eds.), Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, New York: Springer, 2011; Rachel Alsop, Annette Fitzsimons and Kathleen Lennon, Theorizing Gender: An Introduction, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002; Candace West and Don. H. Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, in Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West (eds.), Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and institutional Change, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 3-25; Dana Berkowitz, Namita N. Manohar and Justine E. Tinkler, ‘Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Woman: Teaching the Social Construction of Gender’, Teaching Sociology, Vol. 38, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 132-143. For Specific work on masculinity and the idea of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, see Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; C.J. Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; Dennis K. Mumby, ‘Organizing Men: Power, Discourse, and the Social Construction of Masculinity(s) in the Workplace’, Communication Theory, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 164-183; Michael Kimmel (ed.), The Politics of Manhood, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995; Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson (eds.), Men & Masculinities: A Social, Cultural and Historical Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara: ABC- CLIO, 2005.

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talking about the essentialist, hegemonic definition of bio-identity subscribed to by those on the extreme-right. Gender is seen by the extreme-right as a political weapon. Both one that they can use in their ongoing culture war, but also a weapon to be used against them, and against their imagined social hierarchy. Gender has been constructed as something of a ‘final frontier’ in the expansion of progressive ideology, and has been a key battleground for far-right parties and organizations around the world. The weakening of the traditional and the move towards a more complex understanding of gender on a societal level is a tangible shift upon which can build opposition, and it has become a focal point for radical and extreme right alike. The foundations of the far-right’s gender politics go as deep if not deeper than the ideology’s origins themselves, and are built on fundamentalist, archetypal, and ultimately dichotomous gendered moulds. The disruption of this dichotomy by progressive movements – such as the second wave feminist movement – has always been presented as degenerate and dangerous by the far-right, and has been tied together with anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories which portray it as an anti-white and anti- plot by nefarious foreign elements.

Thus on the far-right – and to an extent in broader society – the maintenance of strict gender roles and norms has been tied inextricably to the preservation of white supremacy. Gender is as central to the boundaries of whiteness within the far-right space as race itself, and true whiteness in the white supremacist mindset is necessarily straight, cisgender, and in line with traditionalist expressions of masculinity and femininity.

Across the far-right spectrum there are of course case studies which disrupt this narrative, particularly as a result of pinkwashing and in Europe, through which radical- right parties have sought to frame their as progressive and pro-LBGTQ – or rather

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pro-LGB, as the trans and genderqueer communities are universally targeted by the far-right regardless of national context. However, in the context of the extreme-right, acceptance into the boundaries of whiteness is inherently conditional upon gender and sexuality.14

Indeed, the conditionality of whiteness is central to the idea of whiteness itself. Since the inception of whiteness as a broad racial category in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, behaviour, identity and cultural expression have been used to both include and exclude entire categories of people from the privileges and benefits of whiteness. The growing field of whiteness studies - which endeavours to explain the construction of whiteness as a racial category - has been formative in the conceptualization of this dissertation, and the contribution of scholars in this field to discussions of intersectionality and whiteness has laid the groundwork upon which all modern studies of organized white supremacy can be built.15

Theoretically and methodologically, intersectionality lies at the very core of this study. The understanding of violent white supremacy as relying not only on racial identity but on gendered

14 Julio Capó Jr., Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State Since the 1970s, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020; Dean Spade and Craig Willse, ‘Sex, Gender and War in an Age of Multicultural Imperialism’, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol 1, No. 1, “Chelsea Manning’s Queer Discontents” (Spring 2014), pp. 5-29. See also the issue of ‘’ – the use of women’s rights discourse in xenophobic and radical right politics. Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 15 For an overview of the field of whiteness studies see: Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999; Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs, New York: Basic Books, 2005; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 1991. For a more detailed examination of modern politics see Fran Shor, Weaponized Whiteness: The Constructions and Deconstructions of White Identity Politics, Boston: Brill, 2020 and Ashley Jardina, White Identity Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. For an examination of identity politics and the new far- right see Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right- Wing Politics of Precarity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019; Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality, New York: oxford University Press, 2016.

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and sexual identities is central to this project’s framework, and the intersection and interaction of various identities underpins and informs both the rhetoric and violence of the extreme-right.

Indeed, the intersectionality of hateful ideologies is often understudied and underrecognized by theorists and scholars, and the layers of racial supremacism, male supremacism, sexual supremacism and religio-cultural supremacisms that are at the core of have not received the attention that they are due.16 This study seeks to transcend the traditional “single axis horizon” through which violent white supremacism has been studied, taking a more three- dimensional approach to the social milieu of extremism.17

By utilizing an intersectional framework to unpack the politics of inclusion and rhetorical elevation on the extreme-right “Intersectional Hate” also highlights the complex, intersectional politics of victimization and violence. This lens helps to shine light on the violence perpetrated against the most vulnerable and the least protected in society, and centers the experience of those who most often feel the full impact of white supremacist violence and all too rarely receive the necessary protection from the state or community levels, specifically trans women of color and the broader queer Black community.18

16 The work of Alex DiBranco, Pierce Dignam, and the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism stands as a notable exception. The IRMS has done great work in recent years, centering the role of male supremacism in extremism narratives and identifying the ways in which male supremacism interacts with and informs white supremacism. For more information see www.malesupremacism.org. 17 Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Leslie McCall, ‘Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer 2013), “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory”, pp. 785-810. 18 For further reading on intersectionality see: Leslie McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 1771-1800; Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016; Ann Phoenix and Pamela Pattynama, ‘Intersectionality’, The European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2006-08, p. 187-192.

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This dissertation also relies conceptually on critical race theory and the foundational work of

Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda and Richard Delgado, building on the idea that white supremacy is ingrained in the very concept of liberal society on both sides of the Atlantic, and ultimately underpins both the American and British experience.19 Without pervasive societal white supremacy – and indeed the reality of white privilege – the existence and impact of violent white supremacism would be impeded significantly. The relative success and devastating impact of white supremacist recruiting, organizing and violence has been made possible by the structural bolstering of white supremacy through legislation, representation, policing, economic discrimination and cultural imperialism. This project is grounded in the idea that white supremacist violence is facilitated by state violence, and the extreme-right’s social and ideological schema is built on the foundations laid by the white supremacist state.

Finally, this work relies on social movement theory, particularly Asef Bayat’s ideas around networks and social mobilization.20 Understanding how social movements operate in terms of space and ideas has been critical in conceptualizing the transnational elements of this project, and Bayat’s models of network engagement have been formative. The transformation of the extreme-right movement from an idea-bound milieu with no solid network structure into a global

“passive network” bound both by ideas and space – albeit digital space – as a result of internetification has energized the far-right over the last thirty years. This digital shift has played

19 Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (eds.), Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And the First Amendment, New York: Routledge, 1993; Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Thomas Kendall (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, New York: The New Press, 1995; Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, New York: Basic Books, 1992. 20 Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Second Edition, San Francisco: Stanford University Press, 2013, pg. 26.

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a key role in the conceptualization of this project, particularly as the project timeframe extends from the solidly pre-digital age into the peak era of digital and technological innovation.21

As a transnational history of the extreme-right that deals primarily with questions of gender and violence, this dissertation finds an important niche within the existing literature and addresses questions that have so far only been briefly alluded to in comparable works.22 It will be the first such project to explore the relationship between race and gender on the violent extreme right since Kathleen Blee’s Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement was published in

2002, and will be the very first to do so transnationally.23 Blee’s 2002 book – and her earlier

21 For works on the far-right’s use of the digital space to organize, recruit and radicalize see Peter Daou, Digital Civil War: Confronting the Right-Wing Menace, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019; Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston (eds.), Post-Digital Cultures of the Far-Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019; David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017; Manuela Caiani and Linda Parenti, European and American Extreme-Right Groups and the Internet, London: Routledge, 2016. 22 The broader historiography of the extreme and radical-right is growing rapidly, and is becoming increasingly global in its scope. More recent global histories of the extreme-right include Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Leonard Weinberg, Right-Wing Violence in the Western World Since World War II, New Jersey: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2021; Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton (eds.), Global White Nationalism: From to Trump, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of from World War II to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; Matteo Albanese and Pablo del Hierro, Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century: Spain, Italy and the Global Neo-Fascist Network, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. For histories of international fascism prior to and during the Second World War see Marzia Casolari, In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Relationship Between Indian Radical Nationalism, and Nazism, London: Routledge, 2020; Marco Maria Aterrano and Karine Varley (eds.), A Fascist Decade of War: 1935-1945, New York: Routledge, 2020; Ricky W. Law, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919-1936, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; Sandrine Kott and Kiran Klaus Patel (eds.), Nazism Across Borders: The Social Policies of the Third Reich and their Global Appeal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018; Johannes Dafinger and Dieter Pohl (eds.), A New Nationalist Europe Under Hitler: Concepts of Europe and Transnational Networks Within the National Socialist Sphere of Influence (1933-45), London: Routledge, 2018; Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe (eds.), Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945, New York: Berghan Books, 2017. For sociological and political studies of the modern global far-right see Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch (eds.), The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century, London: Routledge, 2020; Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far-Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020; Katherine C. Donahue and Patricia R. Heck (eds.) Cycles of Hatred and Rage: What Right-Wing Extremists in Europe and Their Parties Tell Us About the US, Cham, CH: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. 23 Kathleen Blee, Inside Organized Racism: Women of the Hate Movement, Berkeley: University of the California Press, 2002. Other works on gender and the extreme-right, mostly in a sociological context, include Cynthia Miller- Idriss and Hilary Pilkington (eds.), Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right: Mechanisms of Transmission and

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work, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s – laid the important groundwork for my own study, opening the conversation about women’s participation in a subculture generally thought of as exclusively masculine.24 Blee offered a fascinating comparison between women’s racist activism in the 1920s with a contemporary exploration of 21st century activism, suggesting common themes across the periods and common radicalizing factors that drove women towards both passive and active engagement.

The limitations of Blee’s work lie primarily in scope, and that is what my dissertation will seek to rectify. Blee looked exclusively at the United States, discussing women’s involvement in Klan and Neo-Nazi groups. My own exploration of this topic will broaden the discussion significantly, discussing the transnational features of racist radicalism and bringing in at-length discussion of the United Kingdom, as well as some discussion of South Africa, the Antipodes and Western

Europe. The following chapters will argue that the extreme-right is a global movement, and that the social politics of extremist groups have much in common despite national, cultural and linguistic boundaries. Furthermore unlike Blee’s foundational work, it will also explore the issue of gender much more broadly, taking into account questions of masculinity as well as those relating to femininity and women’s participation in hate groups. This will allow for a much deeper insight into the intimate politics of hate groups, and will provide a fuller picture of the social forces that drive organized racism around the world.

the Role of Educational Interventions, New York: Routledge, 2018; Michaela Köttig, Renate Bitzan and Andrea Petö (eds.), Gender and Far-Right Politics in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 24 Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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In 2018, Elizabeth Gillespie MacRae made an important addition to the historiography of women and the far-right with Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White

Supremacy.25 MacRae explored the critical role that suburban women’s activism played in the maintenance of segregation and white supremacy, particularly in the US South and South-West.

Arguing that the bureaucratic and social role that women held in Southern society during the era of Jim Crow allowed them unparalleled opportunity to impose both legal and social segregation,

MacRae suggests that Southern White Women were the key drivers of the Massive Resistance

Movement which opposed any and all integration efforts.26 MacRae’s book offered an entirely new and extremely important perspective on the role of women in radical-right politics, and has further advanced the conversation about the broader picture of organized and institutionalized racism in the United States. However, much like Blee’s work, MacRae’s study is limited by its scope, and deals exclusively with the American radical-right. In terms of timeframe my project will also essentially pick up where MacRae’s left off, starting its examination of the extreme- right in 1969 and examining the 40 years that followed. The groups my work addresses operated in an entirely different context, and their ideology and activism was influenced heavily by the unique geo-political and social landscape of the 1970s and beyond.

Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America has offered the most successful blueprint for any history of the far-right, and has demonstrated the popularity and urgency of work this field.27 Belew’s book offers a comprehensive history of

25 Elizabeth Gillespie MacRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, London: Oxford University Press, 2018. 26 For an overview of women in the 21st century American radical right see Melissa Deckman, Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right, New York: New York University Press, 2016. 27 Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

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the military-to-extremism pipeline in America since the , arguing that the ‘potent sense of betrayal’ felt by some White military personnel contributed to the rise of an over-trained and over-armed anti-government militia movement with a distinctly violent racist agenda.

Chronicling the consolidation and ideological evolution of the White power movement that occurred between the 1970s and 1990s, Belew provides vital context to the age of Charlottesville and Kenosha via Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City. Belew’s work has set the bar for histories of the extreme-right in the United States, and was formative in my own understanding of how to approach these difficult narratives.

My own project will again offer a complementary history to that written by Belew, and will build off the solid foundations her work laid. Once again, Belew’s history is limited to the extreme- right in the United States, and my global history of the racist extremist milieu will offer an entirely different perspective on this issue. I will argue that many of the trends Belew explored were happening on a global scale, and that the militarization and ideological consolidation of the extreme-right was ultimately part of a macro trend that was the result of evolving visions of far- right masculinity. Whereas Bring the War Home gave us an excellent history of a localized movement, this dissertation will instead offer a comprehensive examination of extremist social structure, building on areas so far neglected by the vast majority of scholars writing about the violent far-right.

This dissertation is separated into two distinct parts, each examining the rhetoric and reality of gender on the extreme-right in a different way. In part one I look at the way gender was constructed in extreme-right groups in the United States and United Kingdom between 1969 and

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2009, exploring the gendered archetypes upon which extremists modelled themselves and sought to model new recruits. Chapter one explores the construction of femininity on the transatlantic extreme-right in the latter half of the twentieth century, specifically looking at the mobilization of pronatalism and anti-abortionism as tools of racist radicalism. By examining and analyzing the ways in which far-right groups constructed their rhetoric around motherhood, reproduction, and , I argue that pronatalism was one of the most important pillars of the gender politics of the global far-right in the second half of the twentieth century, and that activist women pragmatically mobilized the language of pronatalism to advance their standing and role within the movement. Chapter two analyzes the way in which archetypal masculinity is constructed and curated in the publications of extreme-right organizations, specifically looking at the role violence plays in far-right visions of manliness. By analyzing the idea of a far-right ‘hero- complex’, I argue that visions of masculinity are a powerful radicalizing force that drive men towards violence. I then explore the ways in which masculinity has been performed by individual actors - both within extremist organizations and by ‘ terrorists’ - again looking at the way violence has been used as a gateway to exemplary masculinity, particularly for those who feel that they do not fit the physical masculine archetype. This chapter also briefly explores the origins of the modern ‘’ movement, arguing that idealized visions of ‘Hitlerian’ masculinity were a powerful driving force behind the emergence of violent incel ideology.

Part two looks at the ways in which gender was mobilized in order to shape activism and violence by extreme-right thinkers and groups. The first chapter in this section (chapter 3 of the dissertation) examines the ways the commission of violence was gendered on the extreme-right.

Using written personal accounts of neo-Nazi activists, letters between group members,

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newspaper reports and court records I analyze the extent to which women engaged in violent actions, including but not limited to street beatings, shootings, murders and acts of terror. I examine the ‘acceptable forms of violence’ that were prescribed to women by male writers and theorists, and at the portrayal of lone-actor terrorism as the ultimate expression of martyr- masculinity from which women were excluded. Despite the limitations on women’s violent activism, I argue that most ardent female racist activists pursued violence wherever possible, leading to the emergence of a distinctly violent rhetoric around self-protection that was uniquely constructed in different contexts around the world so as to justify women’s engagement with the training for and commission of deadly violence.

The fourth and final chapter analyzes the ways in which extremist right-wing groups in the

United Kingdom and United States have historically constructed the threat of racialized sexual violence and mobilized it in order to spread hate and radicalize individuals towards violent action. By examining the publications, correspondence, and propaganda of these groups and their members, I argue that the extreme-right has consistently perpetuated a mythology surrounding race and sexuality in order to justify continued rhetorical and physical violence against communities of color and the Jewish community. By using caricatured images of men of color as predatory and violent, white supremacist propagandists constructed an imagined, racialized threat against white womanhood- the imagined sanctity of which was outlined in my previous chapter. By packaging this imagined threat with a conspiratorial worldview which saw the white race as facing an existential threat, far-right activists further mobilized their pronatalist and patriarchal gender ideology in order to justify hate and violence.

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Sadly, as with any academic study, this project has its limitations. In this case, the limitations were dictated by the source material and indeed the devastating impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on source availability during the period in which this study was completed. As such, there are elements of the gender politics of the extreme-right with which this dissertation will not deal, particularly the relationship of the extreme-right to LGBTQ issues. In future drafts and the eventual monograph edition of this work, I hope to deal at length with the homophobia of the far-right, exploring the rhetorical and physical violence against the gay community by British and American Neo-Nazis through the latter half of the twentieth century. A further chapter will examine the relationship of the extreme-right to the transgender community, examining the rise in transphobic violence that accompanied broader social progress towards trans visibility and looking at how further cemented the regressive traditionalist gender norms propagated in the racist extremist space. Finally, this project contains global elements, but has been necessarily framed primarily as a transatlantic history of the extreme right, again largely due to source and funding restrictions and the impact of COVID-19. Future drafts will include a more global scope, specifically formally incorporating South Africa and Australia into its analysis. This will give a broader perspective on the globalization of far-right gender norms during the digital shift, and will highlight the cultural and social exchange that defined the modern far-right’s social milieu.

Nonetheless, examining a key facet of right-wing extremism that has so far figured only nominally in the scholarship, this dissertation addresses issues of urgent contemporary relevance to academics, policy makers and both counter-terror (CT) and Preventing/Countering Violent

Extremism (P/CVE) professionals. The violent extreme-right is once again making headlines

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around the world as the death toll associated with racist terrorism rises. The actions of Brenton

Tarrant, Beate Zschäppe, and many others show the danger presented by the global white supremacist movement. Furthermore, the emergence of far-right movements that specifically mobilize the same victim narratives and ideas of racialized sexual violence – most notably QAnon – highlights the need for the historical context that my research can provide. By examining the most intimate and personal politics of these movements we can begin to understand how they function and how they can be best disrupted. Because the work of the

P/CVE and CT fields relies on an intimate knowledge of radicalized individuals and the social environs in which they operate, this research offers a crucial perspective with significant real- world applications.

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‘A battle of the groin’: The Reproductive Politics of the Global Extreme-Right, 1969-2009

‘The most important thing we can do to insure (sic) the ’s survival is to have as many babies as we can… our racial battle is in reality, a battle of the groin.’ – Dennis Mahon, White Aryan Resistance, May 1993.28

‘If ever a person deserves our honour, reverence and respect it is she who has given us life, the progenitor of our race, and this same respect we must give to all our women who have been, or will be, the means of bringing our descendants into the world.’ – Kenneth McKillian, ‘The Morality of Our Race: Then and Now’, Spearhead, May 1992.29

‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’ – ‘The 14 Words’, David Lane.30

‘It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.’ – Brenton Tarrant, The , 2019.31

Reproductive politics lie at the very heart of the gender ideology of the extreme-right. The

‘propagation of the race and nation’ has been a core tenet of social thought across the right-wing spectrum for the past two hundred years, and while within conservatism the racial rhetoric has been largely replaced with nationalist and economic arguments, the radical and extreme right continue to openly embrace aggressive and racialized pronatalism as a core ideological value.32

28 Dennis Mahon, ‘Make More Babies, Prepare to Survive’, White Aryan Resistance, vol. 12, no. 4 (May 1993), pg. 7, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 29 Kenneth McKillian, ‘The Morality of Our Race: Then and Now’, Spearhead, no. 279, May 1992, pg. 1, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/013. 30 ‘Extremist Files – David Lane’, Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist- files/individual/david-lane, accessed 1/12/2020. 31 Brenton Tarrant, The Great Replacement, March 2019, https://www.ilfoglio.it/userUpload/The_Great_Replacementconvertito.pdf, accessed 11/5/19. 32 The literature on the history of pronatalism is extensive. For reference see Jessica Autumn Broan and Myra Marx Ferree, ‘Close Your Eyes and Think of : Pronatalism in the British Print Media’, Gender and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Feb 2005), pp. 5-24; Leslie King, ‘From Pronatalism to Social Welfare? Extending Family Allowances to Minority Populations in France and Israel’, European Journal of Population, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2001), pp. 305-322;

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The fear of the ‘white race’ being outbred and eventually disappearing altogether- a known as ‘The Great Replacement’- is endemic on the far-right, and is enshrined in the

’14 words’, a slogan and rallying call for white supremacists worldwide that was first coined by convicted terrorist David Lane during his time in prison in the late 1980s.33 From Enoch

Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech to the manifesto of the shooter, the fear of massive demographic change and the end of white racial superiority has been a consistent focus of those on the rightward fringe of politics and culture, and has acted as the primary justification for much of the racist rhetoric and violence of many radical groups and political parties.34 The promotion of white reproduction has been a tool used by many to counter this perceived demographic threat, and activists and theorists alike have framed the ‘production of good Aryan children’ as one of the most powerful weapons in their perceived battle against extinction.

Likewise this trend has seen the extreme-right adopt visceral and violent anti-abortion rhetoric.

Activists have placed abortion within their conspiratorial worldview, seeing it as part of the imagined conspiracy to reduce white birthrates and ultimately weaken the white race. As such, doctors and pro-choice legislators have been the focus of much of the extreme-right’s vitriol, and white women who have aborted pregnancies have been victimized through ‘race-traitor’ rhetoric and even physical violence. This chapter explores the mobilization of pronatalism and anti- abortionism as tools of racist radicalism within the publications of extreme-right groups in the

and Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction and the Family in the United States, 1890- 1938, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 33 Anti-Defamation League, 14 Words, ‘Hate on Display – Hate Symbols Database’, https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-words, accessed 10/3/2019. 34 Enoch Powell, ‘The Birmingham Speech’ or ‘Rivers of Blood’, Speech, General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, 20th April 1968 (transcript at https://anth1001.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/enoch-powell_speech.pdf) ; Brenton Tarrant, The Great Replacement, self-published manifesto, 2019; Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, ‘The Great Replacement’: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2019,https://www.isdglobal.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/07/The-Great-Replacement-The-Violent-Consequences-of-Mainstreamed-Extremism-by- ISD.pdf, accessed 1/13/2020.

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United Kingdom and the United States. By examining and analyzing the ways in which far-right groups in these contexts construct their rhetoric around motherhood, reproduction, and abortion,

I argue that pronatalism was one of the most important pillars of the gender politics of the global far-right in the second half of the twentieth century, and that activist women pragmatically mobilized the language of pronatalism to advance their position within this milieu.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS

To understand the pronatalist tendencies of many activists and theorists on the far-right, it is first essential to understand the fear that drives it. Much of the demographic paranoia that has defined far-right praxis in recent years has been influenced heavily by the ‘Great Replacement’ idea, a conspiracy theory that imagines a plot to weaken and eventually destroy the white race through immigration, out-breeding and inter-racial rape. The idea has become pervasive across the far- right, as demonstrated by the chants of “you will not replace us” that became synonymous with the ‘Alt-Right’ after the in Charlottesville in 2017. The origins of the ‘Great

Replacement’ theory have recently been traced to the writing of , a French philosopher who first expressed his theory on cultural shifts in 2008 with the publication of La

Grande Déculturation, and coined the term ‘The Great Replacement’ in 2011, with the publication of a book of the same title- Le Grand Remplacement.35 However, the ideas espoused by Camus and his contemporaries can be traced back much further, perhaps being most clearly

35 Renaud Camus, La Grande Déculturation, Paris: Fayard, 2008; Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement, Paris: David Reinharc, 2011; Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”’, The New Yorker, Nov 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-french-origins-of-you-will-not- replace-us accessed 12/2/19; Lauretta Charlton, ‘What is the Great Replacement?’, , Aug 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/us/politics/grand-replacement-explainer.html accessed 12/2/19.

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articulated in Jean Raspail’s novel, The Camp of the Saints.36 First published in French in 1973 and translated into English by Norman Shapiro two years later, Raspail’s dystopian novel tells of an ‘invasion’ in which South Asian migrants enter France en masse, while refugees from China storm Russia, eventually ‘destroying western civilization’.37 The novel made headlines as recently as 2019 when it emerged that Stephen Miller, a close advisor to President Donald

Trump, had encouraged many of his colleagues at to read the book.38 Raspail’s work is a foundational text of modern white supremacy, and has influenced individuals across the far-right spectrum, from Marine Le Pen to Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in 2019.39 What is clear, regardless of whether one attributes the birth of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory to Camus or to Raspail, is that the idea originates in

France. The conspiracy theory emerged out of a French far-right movement obsessed with post- colonial migration and the ‘destabilizing impact’ that it would have on the nation.

In fact, it has its true ideological origins during the interwar period, when French pronatalism reached its cultural apex. As scholars such as Elisa Camiscioli, Marie-Monique Huss and Cheryl

Koos have argued, the 1920s and 1930s saw a cultural panic around birthrates that swept the nation- from the halls of power to the classroom and to the bedroom.40 The focus during the

36 Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints, translated by Norman Shapiro, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. 37 Raspail, The Camp of the Saints. 38 Elian Peltier and Nicholas Kulish, ‘A Racist Book’s Malign and Lingering Influence’, The New York Times, Nov 22 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/books/stephen-miller-camp-saints.html, accessed 11/25/19. 39 Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Sarah Wildman, ‘The Inspiration for Terrorism in Came From France’, Foreign Policy, March 16 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/16/the-inspiration-for-terrorism-in-new- zealand-came-from-france-christchurch-brenton-tarrant-renaud-camus-jean-raspail-identitarians-white-nationalism/, accessed 11/25/19; Patricia R. Heck and Katherine C. Donahue, ‘Introduction’, Donahue and Heck (eds), Cycles of Hatred and Rage, pg. 18. 40 Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009; Marie-Monique Huss, ‘Pronatalism in the Inter-war Period in France’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, Issue 1, Jan 1990, 39-68; Cheryl A. Koos, ‘Gender, Anti- Individualism, and Nationalism: The Alliance Nationale and the Pronatalist Backlash against the Femme Moderne,

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interwar years in France, even on the burgeoning fascist fringes of the political class, was less on overtly racist fears of replacement than on a perceived national demographic crisis in the wake of the Great War. The French nation – while undoubtedly a racialized construct in itself – was seen to be in a state of decline. The healthiest French men had been slaughtered en masse on the battlefields of Flanders and Verdun, and what was left was seen as a husk that could not withstand another war, which was of particular concern to the French far-right in the face of the growing “red menace”.41 For fascists like Antoine Rédier, the best of the French nation- those who represented the qualities of duty, obedience and self-sacrifice above materialistic individualism- were ‘decomposing on the battlefields’, while only the decadent and selfish remained.42 Thus a national regeneration - or rebirth - was deemed essential, and it would emerge from the wombs of the French women. Rédier and his contemporaries saw the French woman as the source of the new, stronger French nation, and so pronatalism became so inextricably tied to nationalism.

This rhetoric was also reflected in the writings of Afrikaner activists in South Africa during the same period. As Afrikaner nationalism grew in strength the maintenance of white supremacy came sharply into focus for activists, and the promotion of motherhood as a demographic weapon soon followed. Anxieties around encirclement and both cultural and racial erasure entered mainstream political discourse and the Afrikaner identity - which from its earliest iterations was built upon a perceived victimhood status - began to thrive in its own siege

1933-1940; for further reading on this see also Andrés Horacio Reggiani, ‘Procreating France: The Politics of Demography, 1919-1945’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, Spring 1996, pp 725-754. 41 Cheryl A. Koos, ‘Fascism, Fatherhood, and the Family in Interwar France: The Case of Antoine Rédier and the Legion’, Journal of Family History, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 1999, pg. 317. 42 Koos, ‘Fascism, Fatherhood, and the Family’, pg. 319.

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mentality. Thus, the interwar period saw the growth of a distinctly Afrikaner pronatalist movement and the emergence of the Volksmoeder concept, through which motherhood and nation were inextricably linked and childbearing was bestowed with an almost spiritual significance. This idea, first espoused by Willem Postman in his 1918 publication, Die

Boervrouw: Moeder van haar Volk, would form the basis for almost century of Afrikaner identity and gender politics.43 The concept not only tied nationalism to reproduction, but actually made a woman’s participation or belief in nationalist politics contingent on reproduction. The

‘mother role’ was bestowed with great respect and reverence, but crucially womanhood itself was still placed in a subjugated position, restrained by the traditionally hyper-patriarchal and

Calvinist gender norms of Afrikanerdom. The Boervrouw – literally translated to ‘Farmer’s

Wife’ – was defined by her relationship and ultimately demographic contribution to the

Afrikaner ‘volk’- a concept which itself was bestowed with spiritual and deeply racialized connotations, much like the use of the term in interwar Germany.44 Only by producing the next generation of Boers could the Afrikaner woman gain a stake in the ‘national’ project, and motherhood itself thus became a political tool in interwar South Africa. The legacy of this age of intellectual pronatalism can clearly be seen in the publications of extreme-right groups during their fight for the maintenance of Apartheid and later for Afrikaner secession in the 1990s, in which ‘die moeder’ and ‘die tuisland’ (homeland) were regularly bound together as a united and spiritual ‘lewegewende’ (lifegiving) force.45

43 William Postman (Dr. Okulis), Die Boervrouw: Moeder van Haar Volk, Bloemfontein: De Nationale Pers, 1918. The title of this publication translates to ‘The Boervrouw: Mother of Her People’, although the word ‘volk’ was itself a romanticized and spiritualized term that is distinctly racial, national and cultural, and as such is difficult to translate into English. This is similar to the interwar German use of the term. 44 Markus Dirk Dubber, ‘The German Jury and the Metaphysical Volk: From Romantic Idealism to Nazi Ideology’, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring 1995), pp. 227-271. 45 Die Oplossing: Die Boerevolkstaat is Hier!, Die Boere-Vryheidsbeweging, 1990, pg. 2, South African History Archives, SAHA/DeWet/AL3283/B2/2; For further reading on South African population politics in the era see

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MOTHERHOOD: SYMBOLISM AND ACTIVISM

Thus, motherhood itself became a symbolically and practically important role within the global far-right and ultranationalist milieus. On the symbolic level, motherhood and reproduction became a convenient and impactful cynosure for the extreme-right to use in propaganda. The emotive nature and relatability of the mother-child relationship offered a gateway through which propagandists, writers and editors could manipulate their audience, especially when packaged with conspiracy theories that saw the white family as an ‘endangered species’.46 Magazines published by groups from across the extreme-right spectrum were filled with familial imagery, the majority of which presented young, white mothers with their children. These images presented white family life as joyful, innocent, and ultimately something to be protected.

Furthermore, whiteness and purity were packaged together in many of these images, and the white family was presented as something uniquely British. Many of these images were accompanied by slogans such as ‘keep Britain white’ or ‘British Movement for a White Britain’, which clearly tied together the utopian ideal of the image with deeply racist politics, suggesting that a ‘less white’ Britain would lead to the end of the joy and innocence presented in the image.47 Furthermore, the positioning of many of these propaganda images among articles on

‘race-mixing’, abortion, immigration and ‘multiculturalism’ further framed the white family as

Marijke Du Toit, ‘The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism: Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904-1929’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol.29, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 155-176. 46 ‘Help Save this Endangered Species’ (flyer) Women for Aryan Unity, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 47 ‘British Movement for a White Britain!’ (Poster), British Movement; ‘The Pride of British Heritage’ (flyer), British Movement, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01.

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under threat, predominantly by people of color.48 In the context of a 1970s Britain in which many families were living in a situation that was closer to dystopian than utopian, the easy explanation that immigration and people of color were responsible for their plight would have been readily received.49 The flyers, posters and newsletters published by the likes of the British Movement deliberately targeted these populations, selling them on a radically racist platform that they claimed would solve Britain’s ill’s. The family, and white motherhood specifically, was the front line in a propaganda war being waged by the extreme-right, not only in Britain, but in both the

United States and South Africa too. In modern times this propaganda campaign has continued, and has been given new life by the internet and the rise of online organizing. In the last decade both the ‘White Baby Challenge’ and the ‘#tradwife’ trends have gone viral across the self-styled

‘alt-right’ sphere. Both trends perpetuate the idea of reproduction as a white woman’s primary role, with the White Baby Challenge in particular mobilizing the same demographic paranoia that underlies the Great Replacement and white conspiracy theories. The extent to which this modern pronatalist propaganda campaign has been successful in its aims was highlighted in 2017, when far-right blogger and YouTuber was harassed into releasing a video defending her unmarried and childless status, suggesting that the conditionality of far-right femininity has remained fairly constant over the last half century.50 Likewise the

#tradwife trend has encouraged the women of white supremacy to take pride in traditional, homemaking roles. Much like the British Movement propaganda of the 1970s, the #tradwife movement presents an idealized and utopian version of traditional gender roles, centering

48 ‘Do you want this for your Daughter? For your girlfriend?’, British Patriot, c. 1976, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01. 49 John Shepherd, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’: The Callaghan government and the British ‘winter of discontent’, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 50 Lauren Southern, ‘Why I’m Not Married’, YouTube.com, Nov 23, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P- UKPpmQlys, accessed Jan 28, 2020.

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reproduction and ultimately continuing the symbolic pronatalist battle that extreme-right activists had been fighting for decades.51

In the context of a movement that had constructed and relied upon the rhetoric of a looming existential demographic threat, reproduction also came to be perceived as one of the most effective methods of direct action. The language of far-right activists on the topic of motherhood ranged from that of duty to that of an almost spiritual and mystical rite, but its importance remained unquestioned across the white supremacist spectrum. In an article for Spearhead magazine Kenneth McKillian mobilized pseudo-religious language in promoting the mother-role, opening his article by claiming that ‘German idealism regarded the woman as holy, the mother of brave generations, a prophetess.’52 The entire argument of his article is grounded in the language of the ‘holy duty’ of motherhood and the supposed wisdom and purity of the white woman. By evoking the nostalgia and mythology-driven image of a rural and ‘pure’ northern-European mother whose sole duty was as caregiver and home-maker, activists limited the role of women within the movement to the ‘honoured’ position as the ‘giver of life’.53 A woman’s honor was seen as entirely conditional however, and any suggestion of ‘immorality’ seems to have instantly disqualified women from reaching this supposedly coveted position at the center of the family.

McKillian goes on to describe the importance of ‘chastity’ among unmarried white women, tapping into a deep vein of ultra-conservative misogynist thought that sees female sexuality as aberrant and unnatural.54 In violently misogynist language his article claims that chastity, ‘if

51 Annie Kelly, ‘The Housewives of White Supremacy’, New York Times Opinion, June 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt-right.html, accessed Jan 28, 2020. 52 Kenneth McKillian, ‘The Morality of Our Race: Then and Now’, Spearhead, no. 279, May 1992, pg. 1, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/013. 53 McKillian, ‘The Morality of Our Race’. 54 McKillian, ‘The Morality of Our Race’; David G. Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, pp. 36-56.

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abandoned, [can never be] forgiven’, and suggests that ‘present day debauched tarts’ have forfeited their position as producers of the race, putting themselves in a position in which ‘not beauty, nor youth nor wealth would find [them] a man’. McKillian thus constructed the ‘coveted’ position of white motherhood as conditional on a strict and conservative moral code, singling out

‘promiscuity’ as a key disqualifying factor. The editors and writers in Northern Way magazine echoed McKillian’s views on morality and idealized femininity, but instead focused on the

‘modern mother’ as their particular grievance. In an article called ‘A Mothers Touch’ (sic) the author claimed that the ‘modern mother’ who neglected to sleep with their child beside them was the root cause of ‘cot death’.55 Citing a study that suggested that ‘being frequently woken by their mothers movements (sic) may be part of [a child’s] development that helps them wake automatically if their breathing stops’, the article framed modern women as inattentive and negligent in their decision to not sleep with their baby, ultimately blaming women for the sudden and unexplained deaths of their children and suggesting that such women were unfit for motherhood.56 As such the parameters and limitations of women’s engagement with racist activism, even through reproduction, were seemingly still set by men. It was male theorists and male members of these groups who defined the ways in which women could participate in the cause, and men who ultimately defined the form of femininity that was acceptable within these groups.

The exception to this, however, was . Devi, born Maximiani Portas, was a fascist activist-turned-philosopher whose work greatly influenced the British far-right in particular.

Devi’s philosophy emphasized the spiritualist and occultist threads within neo-Nazism, fusing

55 ‘A Mothers Touch’, Northern Way, no. 4 (Spring 1997), Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002. 56 ‘A Mother’s Touch’.

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elements of Hinduism and Aryanism together to forge an ideology that saw Hitler as an incarnation of Vishnu. By the 1970s the British neo-Nazi movement had fully embraced the pseudo-religious and mystic creed that Devi espoused, and as such she was consistently hailed as one of the intellectual leaders that drove the ideology of both the British Movement and the

National Socialist Group (NSG). In her own writings Devi mused extensively on women’s

‘purity’ and morality, and defined acceptable femininity much like McKillian did. Seemingly taking an even harder line than McKillian, Devi claimed that ‘troublesome women who blacken the roles of mother and mate’ were among the worst enemies of the white race, making it very clear that a woman’s position as the producer of the race was therefore constructed as being conditional on her racial and sexual purity, as well as on her commitment to the racist cause.57

In South Africa, the far-right Wereld Apartheids-Beweging, or World Apartheid Movement, set out their perspective on white motherhood in a 1991 publication entitled AIDS, Depression and

Overpopulation. In the publication, which was marked ‘for members’ eyes only’, the author set out the group’s population policy and their desire to ‘preserve their section of the human race’ amidst the perceived threat of the AIDS epidemic.58 The author claimed that, in the white South

African population’s ‘battle’ against the virus, ‘wives and mothers [were] the front line’, and that the ‘emotional drive’ that they have would be central in the pro-apartheid (and in the eyes of the author, anti-AIDS) drive. It was stated that Afrikaner mothers had the ‘wisdom’ to ‘bring their families through the epidemic’, and that in their kitchens they were ‘pioneers of practical bio-

57 Savitri Devi, ‘The Essentials of Savitri Devi: Quotations from The Lightning and the Sun, Blood and Soil, issue 2, pg. 22, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01. 58 P.D.G. Quirke, AIDS, Depression and Over-Population, Wereld Apatheids-Beweging, June 1991, SAHA/AL3283/B2.8.

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chemistry and physics’ which could ‘learn and beat the tricks and nature of AIDS’.59 Later in the document Afrikaner men are instructed to ‘leave the anti-AIDS campaign in the mothers’ hands’, instead fighting the physical battle against the ‘savagery of the violent masses’. This idea of the wisdom of the home-making mother, and its dichotomy with the brutal and physical role of the father, was common across all the contexts with which this project deals, and it builds off of the same mystical tradition that McKillian lauded in his article for the British Movement.

These ideas find perhaps their widest circulation in the writings of far-right author William

Luther Pierce, whose now infamous first novel, , has inspired racist violence from Oklahoma City to Cologne.60 In both The Turner Diaries and the later-published Hunter

Pierce clearly outlines his racist ideology through fictionalized stories, leading the Anti-

Defamation League to call the novels ‘ of the Racist Right’.61 In both novels white motherhood is consistently portrayed both as a duty of womanhood and as a key battleground in what is perceived as an ongoing race-war. In Hunter, protagonist Oscar Yeager and his partner

Adelaide discuss the ‘loss to the race’ that would have occurred had Adelaide been a lesbian, suggesting that her usefulness to the ‘white race’ is dependent on her becoming a mother. They later suggest that she was ‘not doing the race much good’ as it was, and that they ‘ought to do something about that’, going on to say that Yeager and Adelaide needed to ‘think seriously about

59 AIDS, Depression and Over-Population. 60 The Turner Diaries alone has become one of the most widely-distributed racist tracts in recent history, and has directly influenced perpetrators of extremist violence across the globe. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was known to distribute copies and excerpts of the book at gun shows across the American midwest in the early 1990s, and the bombing itself was almost a word-for-word re-enactment of an attack detailed in the book, during which a federal building was bombed using a van packed with ammonium-nitrate explosives. In Germany, copies of both The Turner Diaries and Hunter were found on the scorched hard-drive of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, who alongside Beate Zschäpe were responsible for a decade-long campaign of anti-Turkish violence, in which nine died and many more were injured; William L. Pierce, The Turner Diaries, Hillsburgh, WV: National Vanguard Press, 1979. 61 Pierce, The Turner Diaries; William L. Pierce, Hunter, Hillsburgh, WV: National Vanguard Books, 1989.

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getting [her] pregnant’ and claiming that ‘it [was] a crime against Nature for someone with

[Adelaide’s] genes not to have five or six kids’.62 Pierce clearly constructs the idea that white womanhood and investment in whiteness are contingent on motherhood and the ‘continuation’ of the white race. This is made more glaringly obvious by Pierce’s treatment of mixed-race couples, who he singles out as ‘race-traitors’ in the early chapters of Hunter. Miscegenation is singled out as a particularly abhorrent crime in the eyes of Pierce and many theorists on the far-right, and has been a source of panic for white racists around the globe. As is the case throughout Pierce’s writing, it is often white women in mixed-race relationships who are most often targeted with abuse and violence, while white men who are in relationships with people of color receive little or no attention at all. This speaks to the intersectionality of hate that is so prevalent on the extreme-right, and demonstrates the deep-seated and violent misogyny that accompanies its virulent racism. In Hunter, Pierce seems to almost rejoice in recounting the wanton violence with which Yeager murders white women who are involved in relationships with men of color, demonstrating the hypocrisy of his ‘protective’ rhetoric regarding femininity, motherhood and womanhood throughout the rest of his writing.63

In an unmistakably misogynist and racist understanding of sexual politics, women who were involved with relationships with men of color were the most common concern for men within extreme-right movements in all three case studies, and miscegenation was often singled out as the most ‘traitorous’ action that a female activist, or a white woman in general, could commit.

Meanwhile, in line with Pierce’s rationale on the subject, men who were involved with women

62 Pierce, Hunter, pg. 53. 63 Pierce, Hunter, pp 1-12.

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of color were almost never mentioned. Women, it seems, were seen to be the guardians of the bloodline, and the responsibility for the purity of the race lay firmly on their shoulders.

Continuing his homily on the immorality of the modern age with a telling tangent, Kenneth

McKillian goes on to deal, albeit briefly, with the question of miscegenation. He racialized the issue of female sexuality and morality, claiming that the ‘modern white woman’ has ‘sold her honour for Jewish gold on Hollywood casting couches’.64 In doing so he mobilizes a long- standing trope that sees the sexuality of men of color and Jewish men as predatory and as a corrupting influence on white women.65 In a 1978 issue of British Patriot magazine the unnamed editor mobilizes similar tropes to characterize ‘race-mixing’ as ‘dirty, diabolical and dangerous’.66 The article presents two pictures of mixed-race couples with the captions ‘want this for your children?’ and ‘want this for your girlfriend?’, alongside a lengthy and vitriolic paragraph in which miscegenation is characterized as a ‘filthy perversion’ that ‘spits in the face of God’.

The article then goes on to mobilize the conspiracy theory of white genocide, claiming that miscegenation is driving the white race ‘towards the point of extinction’, and that ‘one witless ignorant person can be the destruction of that line of human evolution’. Similarly to the rhetoric of William Pierce, the author suggests that those involved in mixed-race relationships should be

64 McKillian, ‘The Morality of Our Race’. 65 This trope can most plainly be seen in the dehumanizing rhetoric surrounding African-American men in the Jim Crow South, but is present in almost all racist thought and extends to all ‘non-Aryan’ people, particularly people of color and Jewish men. The trope of racialized rape in particular can be seen in D. W. Griffith’s (Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, Epoch Producing Co., 1915). The language of non-white sexual deviance is also omnipresent in the writing of William Pierce, whose works have been described by the Anti-Defamation League as ‘bibles of the racist right’, and continue to be extremely influential in radical racist circles today. 66 ‘Want this for your children? Want this for your girlfriend?’, British Patriot, No. 62, September 1978, Seachlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/001.

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subjected to violence, ultimately suggesting that they should be ‘hanged for racial treason’.67 A later edition of the magazine came with a set of stickers emblazoned with the words ‘Race-

Mixing Destroys Our People’, which presumably would have been aggressively targeted at mixed-race couples, in line with long-established British far-right fliering and harassment tactics.68 The obsession with white women in relationships with men of color speaks not only to the unbalanced demographic pressure put on women, but to a deep sexual paranoia among men within the extreme-right. The vitriol expressed in the British Patriot articles reads as abject fear, and the cultural panic about men of color’s relationships with white women - complete with sensual images of mixed-race couples, strategically placed so as to evoke anger – suggests a sense of inferiority and entitlement that has many similarities to trends within today’s ‘incel’ movement.69 Furthermore the portrayal of men of color in mixed-race relationships as predatory removed all agency from the women in said relationships, and further suggests a deeply misogynist trend of sexual entitlement among the white men who are producing these materials.

As was the case with most of the movement’s propaganda relating to reproductive politics, however, it was packaged alongside conspiracy theory and demographic hysteria and sold as a defense of race and bloodline.

MOTHERHOOD AS PRAXIS

67 ‘Want this for your children?’. 68 Melanie Smith and Chloe Colliver, ‘The Impact of Brexit on far-right groups in the UK: Research Briefing’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2016, pg. 1; ‘Race Mixing Destroys Our People’ (sticker), supplement to British Patriot, No. 64, November 1978, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/001. 69 ‘Incel’, or ‘Involuntary Celibate’ is a misogynist and male supremacist online movement that has evolved over the course of the last decade. Activists in the Incel movement revel in their own perceived sexual inferiority, mobilizing social Darwinist language to claim ‘beta’ status and targeting women with both rhetorical and physical violence. For further reading on the incel movement see Pablo Castillo Díaz and Nahla Valji, ‘Symbiosis of Misogyny and Violent Extremism: New Understandings and Policy Implications’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 2, Dynamics of Global Feminism (Spring/Summer 2019), pp 37-56; Jia Tolentino, ‘The Rage of the ’, New Yorker, May 15 2018.

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While the theory of the mother-role – and its limitations - is evident and abundant, the ways in which activists, both male and female, implemented this theory and lived by these gender roles are more difficult to trace. Perhaps the clearest window into the practical implementation of this very personal and intimate theory are the numerous ‘Aryan Singles’ columns published in both

British and American far-right magazines. Through these personal advertisements we can see the ways in which individual activists sought to implement the ideology espoused by writers like

McKillian, and how they engaged with the concepts of the Great Replacement and White

Genocide. In the Aryan Singles column of White Aryan Resistance one activist from Beverly

Hills, known only as O.E., said that he was ‘ready to settle down with a race-conscious white gal… who really wants at least two white babies’, demonstrating the extent to which this pronatalist message had been adopted by activists and the cultural importance that was placed on reproduction within extreme-right circles.70 This is echoed by other submissions, such as that of

Jonathan, a federally-employed chemist who wrote to the singles column of White Sisters saying that he sought a ‘beautiful wife for the propagation of our kind’. Jonathan then goes on to say that his ideal partner should ‘lean more towards the fertility goddess than the anorexic’.71 It seems then, that many activist men admired and even fetishized motherhood, buying wholesale into the rhetorical exoneration of motherhood and the mother role and ultimately using procreation and parenthood as a weapon in their war for white supremacy. Interestingly, female voices are all but absent from the pen-pal and singles columns, with only one correspondent identifying herself as a woman. The writer, known only as ‘T.V.’, claimed to be a ’20 year old

National Socialist Identity Christian’ who was seeking a mid-twenties ‘Aryan male’ who ‘must

70 ‘Aryan Singles / Pen Pals’, White Aryan Resistance, Vol. 12, No. 4 (May 1993), SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 71 ‘Aryan Singles / Pen Pals’, White Sisters, Final Issue, 1992, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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love children and share [her] ideology’.72 Again in this we see children and parenthood emerging as a theme, however in the case of T.V. it is unclear to what extent this is ideological. What is clear is that more often than not women who did not have any children were either ostracized or even subjected to abuse within the movement. Former Canadian Hammerskin activist Lauren

Manning noted in a joint CARR-Hedayah seminar on de-radicalization in early 2020 that her role in the movement during the 2000s was to “bring the guys beer and have kids”. She noted that she felt pressured “by the movement and by the 14 words” to have children, but ultimately decided that she would not. She then said that her choice to remain childless would later cause her to be

“excluded and ostracized”, particularly by her fellow female members.73 Manning’s experience demonstrates the ways in which female participation was constructed around reproduction and both male and female activists bought into these expectations wholesale, limiting the participation and engagement of women who did not have children. This is echoed in the correspondence of a number of women involved with the international Women’s Aryan Union.

In a letter from Canadian member ‘Kate’ to WAU activist ‘Sandra’, the role of women within the movement is clearly outlined. Bemoaning the lack of female participation in the Heritage Front, Kate claimed that women ‘must support all our men as they march into battle’ and fulfill the role of the ‘noble bearer of children’. Kate decried the ‘once proud and virtuous women [who] seem to no longer care about their image’ and were ‘only after one thing’.74 ‘Aryan’ womanhood was conditional on moral purity and a commitment to the cause,

72 ‘Aryan Singles’. 73 Lauren Manning, 4th CARR-Hedayah Deradicalization Seminar, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, Jan 14 2020. 74 Letter from ‘Kate’ to ‘Sandra’, Women’s Aryan Union Correspondence, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/002.

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which in this case was constructed as unconditional support of activist men and a desire – and perhaps ability – to have multiple children.

Female activists’ engagement with the theory becomes even clearer when we trace the ways in which women mobilized this idealized and theorized idea of motherhood to gain more power within the movement. Those who fit the very specific definition of the ‘pure, white mother’ were bestowed with a mystical and powerful relevance. The mother was seen as the key to future generations, and thus female activists were able to use the perceived power of motherhood to gain leverage and influence. One writer from the Aryan Women’s League mobilized this power when she boldly proclaimed, ‘WE ARE THE BEARERS OF THE FUTURE WHITE RACE!’75

Within the context of a movement built on the idea of racial extinction this statement held significant authority. Motherhood could be and was used as leverage for many female activists who sought to gain influence in the movement, and it was the rhetorical use of motherhood as activism that saw women-led regional groups in the mold of the California-based Aryan

Women’s League emerge in the 1990s.76

The extreme-right in all three of my case studies promoted motherhood as the pinnacle of a white woman’s life, and pronatalism was at the very foundation of the movement. Bolstered by a conspiratorial worldview in which the white race was being fast outbred and moving towards extinction, racist extremist groups in South Africa, the UK and the USA saw the production of a new, healthy generation of white children as the single most important step an activist of any

75 Attention White Women! (flyer), AWL, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 76 ‘Greetings from the Oklahoma Aryan Women’s League’, White Sisters, Final Issue, 1992, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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gender could take, and as such the position of mother, or ‘lifegiver’, was bestowed with authority and power that women could mobilize in order to increase their social standing within the extremist milieu. Medical anthropologists Margaret Lock and Patricia Kaufert explain that this is a trend not limited solely to the political fringe, and that political and social pragmatism is often a driving force behind women’s decision to accept or even mobilize otherwise restrictive norms or expectations. Lock and Kaufert suggest that when the ‘apparent benefits outweigh the cost to themselves’, women have often embraced ideologies or systems which, on surface-level, seem to restrict or even commit violence against them.77 Thus, many female activists embraced the pronatalism and restrictive gender norms of the extreme-right as it allowed them to access the revered and influential mother-role - a trend which contributed to the almost unanimous acceptance of the far-right’s reproductive agenda.

SCIENCE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE EXTREME-RIGHT

One area which seems to divide the extreme-right more than it unites it, however, is the question of , and in particular the application of eugenics to the white population. As Geoff Read notes in his work on inter-war France, the conflict between laissez-faire pronatalism and a more focused eugenic program has been a constant factor in societies facing perceived demographic crises since the pseudo-science of eugenics came into existence.78 For the far-right in the late 20th and early 21st century this question was complicated even further due to the existence- and

77 Margaret Lock and Patricia A. Kaufert (eds.), Pragmatic Women and Body Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pg. 2. 78 Geoff Read, ‘” Citizens Useful to Their Country and to Humanity”: The Convergence of Eugenics and Pro- Natalism in Interwar French Politics, 1918-1940’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Vol 29:2, Spring 2012, pp 373-397.

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usefulness to the eugenic cause- of embryonic research and genetic manipulation. In general, the consensus on the far-right seems to be skeptical of science and predominantly sees modern medicine – particularly that relating to reproductive and natal issues - as a menace rather than an aide to the cause. Many authors thus promoted an indiscriminate and untethered pronatalist policy that advocated quantity over quality. In McKillian’s article he explicitly claims that it is ‘a crime to limit the number of children’, clearly stating his opposition to any form of birth control and again suggesting that the role of the white woman should only be to have as many children as is naturally possible.79 McKillian’s views on birth control build upon those expressed in earlier volumes of Spearhead, most notably in an article from 1977 entitled ‘Policies to meet the rising tide of colour’. In a much more conspiratorial analysis of birth control and sexuality,

Richard Verrall claims that ‘Western … deliberately and artificially hastened [the decline of the white race] by the indiscriminate promotion of birth control amongst the White nations’, and that the people of the ‘West’ are ‘either in the grip of some peculiar liberal death wish, or at the mercy of forces which are deliberately promoting the progressive reduction of

White peoples throughout the world’.80 By placing birth control within the broader context of a conspiratorial worldview in which ‘forces are [seen to be] working for the destruction of the

White race’, the author makes his pronatalist argument almost impervious to rational criticism, and bolsters the strength of his case in the eyes of those sharing his conspiratorial mindset.81 This is something echoed by later proponents of internationalist far-right activism, such as the British branch of the International (ITP). The ITP, which described itself as ‘a federation of nationalist individuals, groups, associations and movements from across Europe’, emphasized

79 Ibid. 80 Richard Verrall, ‘Policies to Meet the Rising Tide of Colour’, Spearhead, No. 101, Jan 1977, pp 6-7,10, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/013. 81 ‘Policies to Meet the Rising Tide of Colour’.

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the cultural, religious and ‘moral’ links that they said bound together the white population around the world.82 Core to this ‘moral order’, the author claimed, was the family, and any attempt to destabilize or disrupt the family order was framed as an attack on whiteness. The author claimed that the family was ‘the primary element and centre of any healthy society’, decrying ‘all agencies and policies which seek to restrict, undermine or destroy Family Life’.

These ‘agencies and policies’ were then listed by the author, and included ‘abortion, artificial birth control, euthanasia, divorce, homosexuality, genetic experimentation… and vivisection’.83

The ITP were adamantly opposed to any external forces interfering in the ‘life-giving principles’ of family life, and pointedly included the more scientific forms of eugenic manipulation. The state, they claimed, was ‘duty bound to do all in its power to make large families the norm in… society’, clearly aligning themselves with the laissez-faire pronatalist organizations who saw all white reproduction as good reproduction.84

In contrast, however, Linda Miller, a British activist writing in Spearhead magazine, set out the radical racist justification for supporting embryonic research.85 Tapping into the classical fascist trope of a rapidly degrading population and a ‘suicidal tendency’ towards ‘down-breeding’,

‘laziness’ and degeneracy, Miller argued the case for genetic manipulation as a way of breeding a stronger, healthier white population while eliminating the ‘weak’.86 Miller constructed a hierarchy of humanity at the top of which she places white, straight, able-bodied British men and

82 The International Third Position: An Introduction to the movement of Tomorrow, (no date) Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002. 83 The International Third Position. 84 The International Third Position. 85 Linda Miller, ‘A Woman’s Viewpoint on Embryo Research’, Spearhead, no. 255, May 1990, pp 6-7, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/014. 86 Miller, ‘A Woman’s Viewpoint’.; Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990; Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel (eds), The Ethics of the New Eugenics, New York: Berghan Books, 2014, pp. 15-34.

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women, arguing that this ‘most valuable’ population was forsaken by society and government in favor of the ‘least valuable’. In unmistakably eugenic language Miller claimed that ‘the congenitally sick and disabled are unnaturally preserved, and drugged or patched up in the name of ‘humanitarianism’’, and that ‘the healthy, intelligent individual is made to be ashamed of being thus’, mobilizing the trope of a ‘liberal conspiracy’ working to weaken the white race.87

This is something echoed in many of the publications of the Aryan Women’s League, which heavily promoted ‘selective breeding’, and pursued a policy of both positive and negative eugenics. In a promotional flyer entitled ‘Attention White Women!’, published and distributed by the group, the author makes clear her position on eugenics, claiming that in accordance with

‘nature’s law’ the group would endeavor to ‘weed out the weak, unmotivated and “fence-sitters” to create the best and the strongest’.88 For both Miller and the leaders of the Aryan Women’s

League, the production of the fittest possible white race was more important than indiscriminate promotion of white reproduction, and thus they constructed white motherhood as a privilege, rather than a God-given right.

There can be little doubt, however, about the support of far-right activists for racist, negative eugenics and compulsory sterilization programs as applied to people of color.89 In a 1976 edition of British Patriot the unnamed author reported that ‘2,000,000 Indians [had] been sterilised in an attempt to slow the population growth’, then went on to pointedly note that ‘unfortunately, all were resident in India, none in Britain’.90 This idea is echoed by an unnamed American activist

87 Miller ‘On Embryo Research’. 88 ‘Attention White Women!’ (flyer), AWL, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 89 For an exploration of how this issue was constructed in the mainstream Christian right, see Melissa J. Wilde, Birth Control Battles: How Race and class Divided American Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 90 British Patriot, No. 44, August 1976, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01.

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writing in a 1991 edition of White Sisters, in which they offer a lengthy hagiography of Planned

Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, whom they label a ‘Eugenics Visionary’ who focused her energies and efforts on ‘poor black populations’. The author gleefully recounts how Sanger saw the ‘inferior races’ as ‘a menace to civilization’ and ‘human weeds’, very deliberately painting

Planned Parenthood as a weapon in the war for white supremacy.91 The article also highlights the fact that Sanger’s included ‘indigent white mothers’ as well as women of color, suggesting that the author supported the use of negative eugenics even amongst the white population, much like Linda Miller did. It is interesting that this defense of Planned Parenthood should come from a women-run magazine, as the attitudes towards the foundation and abortion more broadly in male-run publications are uniformly condemning. This would suggest that activist women used their column-space within White Sisters and similar magazines to attempt to turn opinion in favor of Planned Parenthood, which offered important healthcare services to the women of the movement. By praising Sanger as a ‘white warrior’ these women were able to portray Planned Parenthood as a racist weapon and a friend of the extreme-right, perhaps with the ultimate goal of making access to healthcare and family planning easier and more socially acceptable within their extremist circles.

THE EXTREME-RIGHT’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST ABORTION

91 ‘Margaret Sanger: Eugenics Visionary’, White Sisters, Vol 12, No.4, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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The debate around family planning and abortion offered the site for what was perhaps the most unexpected evolution of the American extreme-right in recent years, when the broad spectrum of far-right groups and ideas coalesced into one new deadly, revolutionary ideology in the late

1970s and 1980s. While the extreme fringes of the Christian right and the anti-government right had long been at opposite ends of the far-right spectrum in the United States – thanks largely to

Eisenhower’s program of Christianization and the rise of political Christian fundamentalism through the mid-century – the two ideologies became unlikely bedfellows in the late 1970s as the extremist opposition to the Roe vs Wade decision and the resultant spread of family planning infrastructure began to consolidate. While the mainstream Christian right continued to mount a primarily political anti-abortion campaign, the most radical arms of the fundamentalist Christian right – including but not limited to the adherents of the overtly white supremacist and anti-

Semitic theology espoused by Richard Butler and the Church of Jesus Christ,

Christian – began to forge new ideological alliances with the rapidly growing sovereign citizen movement and the broader anti-government right, developing their own extremist ideology in the process.92

The resultant creed was a violent, accelerationist offshoot of what would come to be known as

Christian Reconstructionism, itself a radical ideology which promoted the deconstruction of the secular state and the imposition of a theonomic and theocratic state in its place.

Reconstructionism was inspired by the works of radical twentieth-century Calvinists like Greg

92 For a broader overview of the American anti-choice movement see Jennifer L. Holland, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, Oakland: University of California Press, 2020; Fran Amery, Beyond Pro- life and Pro-choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020; Andrew R. Lewis, The Right’s Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

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Bahnsen and Rousas Rushdoony, and was later championed by and Gary DeMar, who argued in their co-authored Christian Reconstructionism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, that the

American political system needed to be rebuilt on the principles of biblical law and libertarian economics.93 North became a leading voice of the more violence-focused accelerationist movement that would later spawn the notorious Army of God and would inspire both Paul Hill and to commit acts of mass violence and terror, and in much of his writing he emphasized the need for an armed struggle leading to a “political and military confrontation” between believers and “the civilization of secular humanism”.94 While North never went as far as to explicitly endorse terrorism, he was a close friend and inspiration to Randall Terry - whose

‘Operation Rescue’ campaign would become a breeding ground for anti-abortion extremists - and praised Terry’s tactic of “physical interposition” as the “first step in the philosophical war against political pluralism”.95 Frederick Clarkson, in his 1998 analysis of the anti-abortion extremist movement for the Southern Poverty Law Center, argued that North played a key role in radicalizing the narrative of Terry and Operation Rescue, and that North’s influence drove Terry towards a more violent and revolutionary campaign. By 1995 Terry was regularly advocating for a theocratic political revolution, calling on Christians to “take up the sword [and] overthrow the tyrannical regime that oppresses them”.96 Terry, North, and the broader Reconstructionist movement played a major role in radicalizing the anti-abortion movement, using pseudo-

93 Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991. 94 Frederick Clarkson, ‘Wrath of ‘Angels’: Anti-Abortion Extremists, ‘Patriots’ and Racists Join Forces’, ‘Intelligence Report’, Issue #91, Summer 1998, , University of Oregon Archives and Special Collections, Coll. 306, The Elinor Langer Research Collection, Series 1 – Information Concerning Right Wing Extremism, Box 2, Folder 23 (Southern Poverty Law Center ‘Intelligence Report’); Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism, Tyler, Tx: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988. 95 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’. 96 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’.

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theological arguments to frame a revolutionary overthrow of the United States government as

Christian duty and ultimately inspiring anti-state and anti-abortion terror.

Furthermore, the violently anti-abortion right brought together the traditional Calvinist and fundamentalist protestant factions with the more radical fringes of the Catholic church, which offered the very rare façade of inter-denominational co-operation on the issue and created an unprecedented united front between the traditional radical right and the radically conservative

Catholic faction. While Calvinist and neo-Calvinist thinkers like Terry, North, Bahnsen and

DeMar drove the reconstructionist justification for violent revolution, prominent Catholics like

Fr. David Trosch, a priest from Mobile, Alabama embarked on their own violent crusades against abortion, advocating directed self-radicalization and lone-actor terrorism. Trosch became one of the most prominent and vocal opponents of abortion from the Catholic right, and became infamous as a result of his violent and often hateful rhetoric. In 1993 Trosch submitted an advertisement to the Mobile Register which featured a clinician, a man holding a gun, and the words “JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE”.97 The advertisement, which was refused by the Register and was seen by many as a clear call to violence, reflected Trosch’s views on the murder of abortion providers, which he later called “a fair trade” for the “millions of babies” aborted by clinicians.98 A year later Trosch submitted a violent screed to Congress in which he claimed that

“a time of massive killing of abortionists and their staffs” was approaching, and that “members of abortion rights and women’s groups could be sought out and terminated as ”.99

97 Parker Holmes, ‘Priest says killing abortion doctors ‘justifiable homicide’’, the Mobile Press Register, 15 August 1993, https://web.archive.org/web/20060727173315/http://www.trosch.org/tro/mpr-7h15.htm#, accessed Feb 1 2021. 98 Holmes, ‘Justifiable homicide’. 99 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’.

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Trosch’s rhetoric was consistently extremely violent, and he overtly called for Catholic believers to engage in murder, terrorism, and other acts of violence against family planning doctors, supporters and infrastructure. His power to radicalize was amplified by his platform as a priest, and despite the fact that both his diocese and the Catholic Church in America distanced themselves from his rhetoric, he had a captive audience who were ready and willing to follow his example and his guidance as a faith-. The fact that there were individuals on both sides of the sectarian divide who were driving the rhetoric of justifiable homicide and calling on believers to commit acts of terrorism presented a new deadly threat in America. Between the revolutionary fervor of the reconstructionist protestant right and the stochastic terrorism of Troschian

Catholicism, the Christian right seemed to be coalescing into a violent insurrectionary force in

America during the late 1980s and 1990s.

On the other side of the far-right spectrum, the more aesthetically militant ‘Patriot’ and militia movements also began to focus more on anti-abortion activism, moving ever-closer to an all-out alliance with the evangelical right. From the moment of the Roe vs Wade decision in 1973 key players in the militia movement began to use abortion law as a rallying call, with many mobilizing anti-choice rhetoric to spread sovereign citizen and anti-government ideology.

Gordon Sellner – a long-time stalwart of the Patriot movement – epitomized the militant right’s embrace of the anti-abortion line, using the Roe vs Wade decision as his public justification for no longer paying taxes, claiming that he could not support a government that was “on the wrong side of God’s law”.100 In many ways his anti-abortion campaign further radicalized Sellner, driving him further into violent sovereign-citizenry and anti-government ideology, culminating

100 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’.

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in his wounding and arrest after a shootout with police in Missoula, in 1993.101

Similarly fellow Montanan Joe Holland, who was at one point the national director of the North

American Volunteer Militia, cited the federal government’s endorsement of abortion as a key radicalizing factor in his own journey, ultimately claiming that it was the “government’s support for murder clinics and the advancement of homosexuals [that] made him a rebel”.102 The

Michigan Militia – with whom Timothy McVeigh trained and was radicalized – became vocally anti-abortion post-Roe, and prominent militiaman Neal Horsely called for a “Nuremburg Trial” for anyone who he considered pro-abortion, doxing over 300 clinicians, politicians, journalists and citizens in the process.103 For the traditionally anti-government right the issue of abortion brought new battlegrounds, new reasons to distance or break from the state, and ultimately new avenues for recruitment.

The confluence of these two political movements over one emotive issue created a hotbed for radicalization and violence, and fed the rapid rise in anti-abortion terrorism that took place through the late 1980s and 1990s. Paul Jennings Hill embodied this confluence, and represented the radicalization of the religious right and their indoctrination into violent anti-government ideology. Hill was an Orthodox Presbyterian minister in Florida who had studied under Greg

Bahnsen – a key influencer in the formation of Reconstructionist theology – during the early years of the Roe vs Wade era. A radical from the outset of his pastoral career, Hill only further radicalized, forming links with the Army of God and increasingly promoting direct action against abortion infrastructure. He was formally defrocked in 1993 after repeatedly claiming that the

101 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’. 102 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’. 103 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’.

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murder of abortion providers was morally justifiable as an act of defense. Only a year later he would go on to commit one of the most high-profile anti-abortion murders in the country’s history, murdering physician John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett outside Britton’s clinic in Pensacola, Florida.104 In the truest tradition of radical accelerationist Reconstructionism and the anti-government surge of the radical religious right, Hill also called for wider armed theocratic revolution against the federal government, citing the ‘lesser magistrate’ doctrine, itself a common tactic of the sovereign citizen movement.105

This coalescence of the broad spectrum of far-right groups in America – which was often a bellweather for the global movement – allowed the most extreme neo-Nazi and fascist groups to form their own anti-abortion platform, using it to radicalize radical conservatives or anti-abortion libertarians into adopting increasingly violent ideologies and tactics. Extreme-right groups on both sides of the Atlantic co-opted the anti-choice movement, fusing it with the demographic conspiracy theories that had been a core pillar of their ideology since the 1960s and forming a new anti-abortionism grounded in the language of conspiracy, white genocide, and ritual murder.

Staple publications of the most extreme factions of the global far-right began to feature prominent front-page columns on abortion in an attempt to draw in the eye of the sympathetic but traditionally more moderate reader.

104 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’. 105 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’; The ‘Lesser Magistrate’ doctrine is a principle that suggests that if the higher civil authority (in this case the government) makes unjust or immoral decrees, the lower authority has a right and a duty to refuse obedience. This was used to justify tax revolt and even violence by the sovereign citizen movement, and the anti-abortion movement regularly in the Roe vs Wade era. Matthew J. Trewhella, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Publishing, 2013.

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The anti-abortion activists writing for these magazines relied heavily on disinformation and the manipulation of facts in order to increase the shock-factor of their articles and stir anger and fear in their readers. One such article in Northern Way magazine – a publication of the British third position movement – mobilized both disinformation and carefully framed information in order to condemn the ‘unnatural born killers’ who performed in Britain.106 In the short, one column article the author claimed that ‘new evidence’ had been released which showed that

‘abortion raise[d] the risk of breast cancer in women by about 30%’, a statement that has been disproven many times by scientific research.107 The author then went on to describe abortion as

‘the systematic and brutal tearing apart of the child and its subsequent removal from its mother’s womb’, later saying that the procedure was ‘one of the most traumatic (both mental and physical) manifestations that the female body will ever have to endure’.108 By fearmongering with false statistics and shocking their readership with vivid accounts of a rare form of abortion procedure,

Northern Way contributed to a chorus of vitriolic anti-abortion propaganda coming from the extreme-right, largely drowning out the voices of Margaret Sanger’s defenders.

Fearmongering and shock factor were the most commonly deployed weapons in the extreme- right’s rhetorical fight against abortion. Using terms like ‘Holocaust of the Innocents’ and

‘Massacre of the Innocents’, far-right publications portrayed abortion as a genocide against a defenseless population- a tactic particularly common in Britain where the passing of the 1967 abortion act continues to evoke anger among some conservative and groups even in

106 ‘Unnatural Born Killers’, Northern Way, No. 4 (Spring 1997), SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002. 107 ‘Unnatural Born Killers’; ‘Abortion and Breast Cancer Risk’, American Cancer Society, https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/medical-treatments/abortion-and-breast-cancer-risk.html, accessed Jan 28 2020. 108 ‘Unnatural Born Killers’.

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the 21st century.109 The Crusader – a magazine published by the English Nationalist Movement – was particularly fond of using shocking descriptions and deliberately inflammatory language in its anti-abortion arguments. Calling abortion a ‘Satanic rite’, the magazine would publish graphic images of aborted fetuses alongside overly violent descriptions of ‘babies [being] cut to pieces’ and ‘dropped in a bin liner to die’.110 Giving the fetus agency and consciousness, these articles vividly constructed a story of physical and emotional pain being felt by the aborted child, increasing the emotion and shock that readers sympathetic to the cause would experience.

This process was made even more effective when it was combined with the ideas of demographic crisis that were endemic across the extremist spectrum. In the conspiratorial and racist worldview of those on the extreme-right, the issue of abortion was made to fit seamlessly, and male writers routinely railed against Planned Parenthood and ‘abortionists’ who were seen to be routinely and deliberately murdering white children. Given the passion with which extremist authors promoted a rise in white birthrates, it makes sense that the limitation of reproduction through abortion would be an issue of particular concern, and abortion is regularly mobilized in far-right publications as ‘proof’ of a deliberate and active project of white genocide. Authors construct abortion as a deeply racialized issue, claiming that it is targeted specifically at white populations in order to lower birthrates and advance the cause of the ‘Great Replacement’, and as with most conspiratorial ideas held on the extreme-right the ‘blame’ seems to mostly be laid at the feet of Jewish people. An editorial in the August 2000 edition of the National Front’s White

Nationalist Report claimed that ‘every three minutes another White child is killed in on of

109 ‘Holocaust of the Innocents’, The Crusader, Issue 3, c. 1997, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002; ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (flyer), National Front, c. 1978, SCH/01/Res/BRI/17/001. 110 Michael L. Phillips, ‘Abortion: Tricks of the Trade’, The Crusader, Issue 2, c.1997, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002.

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[Britain’s] hundreds of abortion clinics’, clearly constructing abortion as a racialized attack on the white population, rather than as a service utilized by all sectors of British society.111 An unnamed author in the neo-Nazi British Patriot magazine reiterated this point, explicitly using the language of ‘genocide’ to describe abortion when they said:

More British Babies have been murdered since the abortion act was passed than

Britons killed in the First World War. Stop this genocide NOW! If there is room

for immigrants there is room for BRITISH babies. British Babies before

immigrants. Remember: That aborted baby may have been you. It has been

admitted that the corpses of aborted British babies are being used by industry.

Bring back British decency with BRITISH MOVEMENT – the party that puts

British folk first; no British baby is an unwanted baby – tens of thousands of

Britons need to adopte (sic) them but are brainwashed into adopting n******

offspring.112

Both authors propagated the conspiracy theory of white genocide and what would later come to be known as the Great Replacement, constructing abortion as a weapon of war that was being used almost exclusively against white British mothers and their unborn. In reality, of the 108,894 termination procedures carried out in Britain in 2002, sixty percent of patients were recorded as being white while twelve percent were recorded as black and seven percent as Asian.113 Given

111 ‘Raise High the Flag: The NF is Britain’s Only Hope!’, White Nationalist Report, no. 26, 25th August 2000, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/033. 112 ‘Stop Killing Britain’s Unborn’, British Patriot, No. 47, Jan/Feb 1977, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01. 113 UK Government Statistical Service, ‘Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2002’, Statistical Bulletin, Jan 2003, National Archives, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130123211313/http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Pub lications/PublicationsStatistics/DH_4069635, accessed 12/19/2019; 2002 was the first year in which statistics

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that, according to the 2001 census, Britain’s population was almost ninety-two percent white while only 1.3% black and 3.2% Asian, it is clear that proportionately speaking black or Asian women were more likely than white women to utilize abortion services, nullifying the arguments of both authors and disproving the myth that abortion was being targeted at the white British population.114 Nonetheless, these authors and many other predominantly male activists on the extreme-right continued to propagate the idea of abortion as an anti-white conspiracy, and their language often became both racist and violent when discussing the issue.

In White Aryan Resistance magazine one cartoonist, listed simply as ‘Karl’, summarized the deeply anti-Semitic, racist and conspiratorial view on abortion in America in a single speech bubble, in which he wrote that ‘most abortionists are Jewish or other non-whites’ and that ‘the pro-abortion movement is headed by unfeminine feminist Jewesses, who counsel non-whites to not get abortions [and] slaughter nearly one million white babies every year’. The artist then goes as far as to describe abortion as ‘Jewish ritual murder’.115 It is clear that, like in the United

Kingdom, abortion was constructed by extreme right activists like ‘Karl’ and his contemporaries as a weapon in the imagined war on whiteness that so informed their worldview, and Judaism was portrayed as the most active belligerent. These activists saw ‘abortionists’ as waging war through propaganda and manipulation, ironically removing any agency whatsoever from the women who chose to utilize family planning services for a variety of reasons, and portraying them as either helpless victims or, at worst, race traitors.

regarding ethnicity of abortion patients was readily available. Given the temporal proximity to the publication of ‘Raise High the Flag’ I believe that this is a fair sample. 114 Office for National Statistics, 2001 Census – Standard Tables, https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/query/construct/submit.?menuopt=201&subcomp=, accessed 12/19/2019. 115 Karl, ‘Did You Know’ (cartoon), White Aryan Resistance, Vol. 8, No. 3, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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In order to increase the shock-factor and anger around this deeply racialized issue many authors used the ‘voice’ of the unborn child and mobilized the language of innocence and purity as a contrast to the ‘evil’ of the doctors and women who abort them. In one such article the author mobilized this language in saying; ‘Today my life began. My parents do not know it yet as I am as small as a pollen grain but it is I already. I am to be a girl. I am to have brown hair and hazel eyes. Just about everything is settled. Even the fact that I love flowers.’116 This excerpt not only mobilizes the perceived innocence of childhood, but also the same constructed vision of pure, moral femininity that is mobilized in conversations surrounding motherhood. The female fetus is portrayed as the epitome of purity and innocence, and as the antithesis to the perceived corruption of those who would – in the eyes of the author – wish her harm. This tactic was deliberately used to evoke rage and passion among the readership, and was a key method of radicalizing select individuals towards violence. While the majority of the readers of the piece – and the others like it – would likely become angry but slowly forget about the issue as they made their way through the rest of the magazine, the model relied on the few who would not let their rage subside, and who rather than forgetting would instead choose to act the system that they saw as unjust and murderous.

For those individuals, more resources and pathways to violence always lay in waiting. For those on the most extreme fringes of the far-right anti-abortion movement, there was a blueprint for violent activism similar in form and impact to the Turner Diaries. Rescue Platoon, a serialized fictional account of a “final war” against abortion, gave step by step detail on the planning and

116 Anonymous, ‘Today My Mother Killed Me’, Valkyrie, Issue 1, 1995, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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execution of clinic attacks, offering a guidebook for insurrectionary violence and stochastic terrorism for the anti-abortion militant.117 Throughout the novel the ‘heroic’ Army of God embark on a bloody campaign of bombing, arson and murder, taking countless lives and destroying family planning infrastructure across the United States. Similarly to the Turner

Diaries – in which a global nuclear war sees the emergence of a white Euro-American ethnostate

– the story culminates in a final armed struggle, resulting in the overall victory of the anti- abortion movement and the crushing defeat of progressives and women’s rights activists.

Pro-life Murder: Anti-Abortion Violence

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these words had real-world consequences. Through the 1980s and 1990s clinicians, nurses, patients and visitors to family planning clinics became the focus of violent extreme-right terrorism in the United States, and a new wave of terror. Extremist authors on both sides of the Atlantic regularly used the term ‘murderers’ to describe abortion providers and practitioners, and advocated both state-sponsored and vigilante violence against them, both directly and indirectly. In the first issue of Valkyrie magazine the position of the British Patriotic

Women’s League on abortion was made very clear. The author made the case that ‘abortionists should, like all murderers, face the death penalty’ and that in their ideal Britain abortion would be outlawed entirely.118 Even when violence was not explicitly supported or called for, Mitch

Berbrier argues that the constant construction of narratives of white victimhood and the rhetoric of a genocidal conspiracy was designed so as to radicalize ‘fringe’ individuals towards

117 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’. 118 ‘What we are fighting for’, Valkyrie, Issue 1, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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violence.119 This is much in line with Louis Beam’s concept of ‘Leaderless Resistance’, and relies on the same psychological and social phenomena that underlie both Jihadist and right-wing lone actor terrorism- the radicalization of individuals without direct contact with or even knowledge of an organized group through targeted propaganda.120 This tactic was proven to be effective and deadly, and had a significant impact on the rise of anti-abortion terrorism in the

United States in particular. By the late 1990s the SPLC’s ‘Intelligence Report estimated that since Roe vs Wade there had been over 200 bombings and arsons, 72 attempted arsons, over 750 death and bomb threats and at least six murders carried out by anti-abortion extremists, with the first such incident taking place in 1977 and the pace rapidly accelerating in the mid 1980s to early 1990s.121 1984 alone was dubbed the “Year of Fear and Pain” by members of the extremist

Pro-Life Action Plan (PLAN), and was marked by 25 arsons and bombings.122 Even as the momentum of the broader pro-life protest movement waned the violence increased. In an interview for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report sociologist Dallas

Blanchard argued that the violence of clinic bombings and assassinations alienated the larger movement and scared many moderates away, but only increased the vitriol and revolutionary spirit of the extremist core and further radicalized the more unstable and violence-prone individual supporters who stuck with the movement.123 Blanchard claimed that the shrinking, splintering groups presented a much greater threat than the national mass-movement of the

119 Mitch Berbrier, ‘The Victim Ideology of White Supremacists and White Separatists in the United States’, Sociological Focus, 33:2 (2000), pg. 187. 120 Claire Ellis et al. ‘Analysing the Processes of Lone-Actor Terrorism: Research Findings’, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 2016), pp 33-41. 121Frederick Clarkson, ‘Wrath of ‘Angels’: Anti-Abortion Extremists, ‘Patriots’ and Racists Join Forces’, ‘Intelligence Report’, Issue #91, Summer 1998, , University of Oregon Archives and Special Collections, Coll. 306, The Elinor Langer Research Collection, Series 1 – Information Concerning Right Wing Extremism, Box 2, Folder 23. 122 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’. 123 Clarkson, ‘Wrath of Angels’.

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1970s, and as they merged with other far-right ideologies they became more organized and more hateful, making further terrorism increasingly likely.

Eric Rudolph’s radicalization and journey from Christian Identity adherent to anti-abortion terrorist best exemplifies the impact of the racist right’s propaganda campaign around the issue.

Rudolph bombed two family-planning clinics in Sandy Springs, Georgia and Birmingham,

Alabama as well as a Lesbian bar and the Centennial Olympic Park, both in Atlanta. Of his motivations, Rudolph mobilized the language of murder when he said:

“You have the right, the responsibility and the duty to come to the defense of the

innocent when the innocent are under assault. Would you protect your children

from the clutches of a murderer? Would you protect your neighbors' children

when they were under assault? If you answered yes to both of these, then you

must support the use of force as justified in attempting to prevent the murder that

is abortion.”124

Rudolph’s motivations were clear. He was associated with both the white supremacist Christian

Identity movement and a paramilitary force named the ‘Army of God’, which has been linked to dozens of murders, bombings, kidnappings and hoax anthrax threats. Rudolph’s statement actually echoes and even quotes the Army of God’s ‘second defensive action statement’, in which the members declare their support for violent action against individuals and institutions linked to abortion and claim that ‘whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is

124 ‘Full Text of Eric Rudolph’s Confession’, NPR.org, April 14, 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4600480, accessed 1/12/2020.

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legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child’.125 This statement was itself issued in response to a violent act of anti-abortion violence, when Paul Hill – a defrocked minister and founding member of the Army of God – murdered physician John Britton and his bodyguard, James

Barrett in 1994.126

Crucially, anti-abortion violence was not a form of activism restricted to the male members of extreme-right groups. Women regularly participated in anti-abortion action and in some cases were involved in deadly violence. The most notable case was that of ‘Soldier’ Shelley Shannon, an Army of God activist who was engaged in a total of 35 mostly non-violent but high-profile anti-abortion actions over the course of three years. Shannon had been arrested multiple times, and kept a digitized record of her time spent behind bars which was entitled ‘Mom’s Jail Time

Total’, which in 1991 totaled 98 days.127 In 1992 she began corresponding with a high-profile anti-abortion activist who had murdered a clinician in Pensacola, Florida, as well as John

Brockhoeft, who was convicted of firebombing an abortion clinic in Cincinnati. In her correspondence Shannon described her growing frustration with non-violent action, and soon her activism became more violent and more visible. Throughout 1992 and 1993 she ‘engaged in a holy war of arson and butyric acid [attacks] across three states’. She attacked four clinics in

Nevada and California with ‘liquid rescue’ - an AOG code-name for butyric acid - a foul- smelling liquid which, when injected into the walls, will make a building uninhabitable, before moving on to a more violent campaign of arson and bombing. Over the course of 1992 Shannon attempted to burn down two clinics in Oregon with a homemade napalm solution before

125 ‘Second Defensive Action Statement’, The Army of God, http://www.armyofgod.com/defense2.html, accessed 1/13/20. 126 ‘Second Defensive Action Statement’. 127 ‘Who is Shelley Shannon?’, Army of God, https://www.armyofgod.com/ShelleyWhois.html, accessed 1/18/2020.

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bombing the Alhambra clinic in California with an acetylene gas explosion.128 Shannon was finally arrested for the attempted murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas later that year.

Having failed to access Tiller when she posed as a prospective patient in his clinic, Shannon shot him in both arms with a .25 caliber pistol as he left the building that evening, and was arrested when her rental car was stopped in Oklahoma City a day later. Shannon was sentenced to eleven years in prison for Tiller’s attempted murder, before being sentenced to an additional twenty years for arson in the state of Oregon.129

The actions of Shannon, Hill, and Rudolph marked a natural progression from the violent language of murder and even genocide that was being mobilized by far-right ‘intellectuals’ and columnists, and within the extremist worldview the use of force was deemed to be an acceptable response to the perceived assaults against them, particularly given the rhetoric of divine will that was consistently mobilized across the more religious factions of the extreme-right. Violence was accepted and even expected, with the ultimate goal of many of these movements being a

‘RAHOWA’, or ‘Racial Holy War’ which would include continued violent action against

‘abortionists’ and women who utilized their services.130

128 ‘Who is Shelley Shannon?’. 129 ‘Who is Shelley Shannon?’. 130 ‘RAHOWA’, Hate on Display, Anti-Defamation League, https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate- symbols/rahowa, accessed 1/13/20; ‘ Movement’, Extremist Files, Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/creativity-movement-0, accessed 1/13/20.

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Conclusion

The construction of femininity and the conditions of engagement for women in extreme-right activism were very clear throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. For women who were involved in the movement, reproduction was a necessary and, in some cases, unconditional qualifier for activism. Driven by the fear of extinction and the idea of white genocide, the language of pronatalism was endemic across the extreme-right spectrum in the United Kingdom,

United States and South Africa, and David Lane’s 14 Words were taken as a commandment by both male and female activists, constructing the production of white children as the most effective form of activism that a woman could participate in. As a result, white women’s potential as ‘producers of the race’ allowed them to gain leverage and influence within their extremist circles, however this remained on male terms, and the ‘purity’ and ‘morality’ of women was under close surveillance by the male-dominated groups.

While the divide between laissez-faire pronatalism and a more deliberate program of eugenics was evident, the extremist right was united in its search for a stronger white race. This rhetoric naturally transposed to the issue of abortion, and often became exponentially more violent and conspiratorial in such cases. While female activists and writers sought to temper the movement’s rhetoric around Planned Parenthood and the issue of birth control by praising the racism of

Margaret Sanger, abortion clinics nonetheless received the brunt of both the rhetorical and physical violence of racist extremists. Whether through religious doctrine or fears of white genocide, violence against ‘abortionists’ and women who aborted pregnancies was routinely

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promoted and justified in the writings of extremist groups, and the actions of individuals like

Eric Rudolph and Paul Hill were a natural escalation given the violence of such language.

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A New Homo-Fascistus?131: Male Fundamentalism, Martial Masculinity, and Extreme-Right Visions of Modern Manhood

“Man is like the roaring storm, the foaming sea and the rumbling thunder. Then he melts into space, rages towards the dark gates of death like a bullet towards a target” – Ernst Jünger, Stahlgewittern.132

“[Tom] Metzger, short and stocky, comes across as a good ol’ boy who likes a drink of whiskey and a good cigar now and then and doesn’t mind an occasional off-color story. He wears a World War II Waffen SS ring, which is marked by a lightning bolt, a Viking head and a swastika.” – Don Duncan.133

Masculinity has been the driving force behind much of the far-right’s hatred and violence since the inception of fascist thought. Extreme visions of archetypal masculinity have and continue to underpin and inform the beliefs, rhetoric and activism of racist extremists on both sides of the

Atlantic. Since the proto-fascist era in which writers like Ernst Jünger conceived of a ‘new man’ forged in war and the concept of a homo fascistus first began to emerge, the far-right has envisioned an increasingly violent and toxic form of masculinity as the pinnacle of white manhood. While the exact definition of the ideal white man varies across ideological groupings and cultural spaces, the consistent image of a strong, ideologically driven provider who protects his race, nation and family is unwavering, and this vision innately encourages radicalization and violence, albeit in varying ways and to varying degrees. The fascist man does not always adhere

131 N. Kogan, ‘Fascism as a Political System’ in S.J. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism, New York: Vintage Books, 1969, pg. 13. 132 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, (trans. Michael Hofman), New York: Penguin Books, 2004, pg. 53. 133 Don Duncan, ‘ over Oregon murder pits anti-Klan lawyer against supremacists’, unpublished article transcript for Seattle times, Sep 26 1990, Tyler Bridges Papers, LaRC-1102, White Supremacists and the Reactionary Right.

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to the Hitlerian vision of a strong-jawed, blue-eyed and blond-haired Aryan, but has consistently envisioned himself as a frontiersman, a rugged individualist, a violent protector, and a father.

In the seventy-five years since the decline and fall of state fascism, the idea of homo fascistus has lived on. The post-war far-right has clung to fascist masculinity as a tangible and executable remnant of the ideology upon which their worldview has been built. While the language of the health of the nation and national belonging – Deutschtum in the eyes of the Nazis – has been transposed onto a more esoteric understanding of transnational racial purity and supremacy, the core values of masculinity as the measure of the movement have remained, and the vision of fascist masculinity has been relatively unchanged. Masculinity in its archetypal, fascist form has been valorized, envied, and sanctified by the modern far-right, and continues to drive much of the violence perpetrated by extremists in the ideologically racist milieu. Whether it be a means of attaining it, proving it, or raging against it, the vision of idealized masculinity on the far-right has proved to be a powerful radicalizing force, and has been at the very root of much modern racist terror. Furthermore, the base image and requirements of fascist masculinity are perhaps more universal on the global far-right than ever before. The vision of masculinity in the age of fascism had obvious commonalities across national contexts, but it also had glaring differences. The

Hitlerian, Aryan vision of masculinity did not necessarily transpose easily unto a Spanish or

Italian context, and likewise the clerical of Spain and Romania emphasized religiosity as a measure of masculinity in a way which didn’t translate easily into Nazism.

For the postwar extreme-right, however, the basic vision of a strong, martial masculinity has been one of the few consistencies across a wide and often conflict-ridden ideological spectrum.

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The coalescence of neo-fascist ideologies around whiteness and the replacement – for the most part – of ultranationalism with transnational white supremacy has created a universalist vision of white masculinity in a way that has not been seen with ideas around activism, religion, violence, or even other ideas around gender and sexuality. There are, as with almost any issue on the extremist fringe, competing visions however. While the baseline image of naked masculinity is universal and is shared across the spectrum from the hyper-conservative right to the realm of

Satanist Nazism, the presentation of masculinity has been a site of conflict and competition. The way in which far-right men engage with the ideology of their movement and with wider society is debated amongst different ideological groupings, with the more conservative and traditionalist wings of the movement arguing for ‘propriety’, conservatism and restraint while the more overtly violent and terroristic factions of the extremist fringe place violence and raw power at the center of their own understanding of men’s activism. It is vital, then, that we explore this site of conflict and analyze the obviously critical role that masculinity plays in determining a group or individual’s propensity for violence. By examining the visually and physically violent masculinity of the British and American racist skinhead movements and contrasting it with the suit-and-tie masculinity promoted by conservative Klan groups and the rugged manliness idealized by the survivalist right, this chapter will parse the core distinctions between various far- right masculinities and demonstrate the centrality of violence to post-war fascist masculinities regardless of their aesthetic or ideological sub-grouping. Further, I use the construction of masculinity offered by key far-right authors such as William Pierce and James Mason to argue that a new homo fascistus has emerged over the course of the last 50 years.

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This chapter will explore the ideological construction of masculinity on the far-right in the

United States and United Kingdom between 1969 and 2009. I will examine the ways in which neo-Nazi and other extreme-right groups propagated a vision of idealized, archetypal masculinity as the norm, and mobilized masculine insecurity to radicalize extremists towards violence and terror. The chapter will then examine the competing visions of masculinity, asking what factors contributed to the divergence between conservative masculinity and violent activist masculinities on the extremist fringe. I will explore the ways in which groups promoted violence as an expression of masculinity or as a way to attain cult, masculine status, exploring specific case studies in which groups or individuals committed acts of violence as a result of masculine gender norms. The chapter will conclude with an exploration of self-sacrifice and martyrdom as the ultimate expression of masculinity on the extreme-right, looking at the case of Robert Mathews’

Order and the recent trend of the sanctification of far-right martyrs in ways reminiscent of

Salafist Islamist terror groups.

THE ORIGINS OF HOMO FASCISTUS

Far-right masculinity is most often built upon mythologized archetypes and exemplars from the past who have been stripped of much of their humanity and instead have been imbued with “a whole resumé of emblematic meanings”, becoming “legendary figures” rather than real – dead – men.134 The fascist vision of archetypical masculinity is often tinted with the same romanticized false nostalgia that often defines their idealized vision of society, and is similarly subject to the

134 Roger Horrocks, Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity as Popular Culture, London: MacMillan, 1995, p. 17.

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rhetoric of a lost former glory. In the far-right mindset, the perfect man had a combination of

Grecian athleticism, Prussian , 1950s productivity and primeval survivalism, each element of which is over-emphasized and mythologized to create an impossible vision of masculinity that was contrasted against a mainstream masculinity that was – in the eyes of the fascist – effeminate and impotent.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the way many on the extreme-right in the latter half of the twentieth century saw fascist masculinity drew primarily upon the masculine norms established by the

Nazi regime in Germany. The extremist fringes of the right on both sides of the Atlantic fully embraced Hitler and the aesthetic of Nazism, and so the Hitlerian vision of Aryan masculinity was adopted wholesale in the rhetoric and propaganda of many groups. The idealized man in the eyes of the leaders and propagandists of neo-Nazi groups was the ‘heroic’, self-sacrificing SS officer who embraced violence and war as almost his entire identity. For the far-right the warrior is and always has been a “cultural icon” and war itself has been viewed as a “divine commandment and a spiritual experience that fostered … courage, patriotism, honor, unity and discipline”, and the Nazi-era expression of war has been formative on the rightward fringe for the last century.135 The understanding of this version of masculinity was naturally both limited and reductionist, and took Nazi-era propaganda at its word rather than critically examining the reality of masculinities in the Wermacht. Nonetheless, however, this vision was hegemonic on the extreme-right, and it is important to understand exactly how the men of the movement modelled themselves in order to explain the expressions and consequences of far-right masculine norms. The work of Thomas Kühne, Bernd Weisbrod, and Pamela Selwyn has shed light on the

135 J.A. Mangan (ed.), Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Aryan Fascism, New York: Routledge, 1999, pg. xi.

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question of Nazi masculinity, and has offered a lens through which we can now view the masculine norms of the modern extremist movement. Weisbrod and Selwyn have specifically explored the militarist masculinity of Ernst Jünger and the key role that it played in the conservative revolution that brought about the rise of the Nazi party.136 Following the logic of fascism as a direct and inevitable result of German militarism and the emotional war-wounds of a generation forged on the battlefields of the Great War – a view of the ideology that finds its origins in the writings of Gilbert Allerdyce but is contested and viewed as reductionist by some historians of fascism – Weisbrod and Selwyn argue that Jünger’s personal war experience was deeply formative as he forged his own view of the ideal German man.137 Citing the “massive penetration of civil society by military violence”, the author and translator suggest that male identity in Germany – as exemplified in Jünger’s work – was forged at war and in violence, and that this militarized society became a school in which the vision of “male fundamentalism” was meticulously imparted and ultimately became hegemonic.138 Jünger was concerned with bringing the heroic, self-sacrificing man he saw on the battlefield into the arena of politics, and to advance the “boldest, whose spirit no materiel in the world could break” into positions of power, ultimately arguing for the creation of what would later become the fascist ruling class. Jünger, as

Weisbrod argues, wasn’t necessarily concerned with any political goals or the advancement of any particular political movement per se, but rather with a widespread and general

“intensification, radicalization, and elevation” of society as a whole.139 His ultimate goal was to advance the nation in the mould of the new militarist German nationalism that was being forged

136 Bernd Weisbrod and Pamela E. Selwyn, ‘Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism: Ernst Jünger's Contribution to the Conservative Revolution’, History Workshop Journal, Spring 2000, no. 49, pp. 68-94. 137 Gilbert Allardyce, ‘What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Apr. 1979), pp. 367-388. For contesting views on this issue see Roger , ‘What Fascism Is Not and Is: Thoughts on the Re-Inflation of a Concept’, Fascism, Vol. 2, Issue 2, Jan 2013, pp. 259-26. 138 Weisbrod and Selwyn, ‘Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism’. 139 Weisbrod and Selwyn, ‘Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism’.

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in the ever-lengthening winter of memories of the trenches and fallout from Versailles. Forging a new German man was a key element of this process, and Jünger saw the “male nerve” as the social and cultural epicentre of the nation. “Wherever the male nerve is extinguished”, he claimed in Stahlgewittern, “culture becomes a colossus with clay feet”.140 Masculinity in the

German vein then, at least for Jünger and his ilk, was defined by violence, war, and sacrifice, and this same ideological male fundamentalism came to define masculinity for the post-war extreme right.

Thomas Künhe argues, however, that masculinity in the Third Reich was much more complex than the propaganda of the age would suggest, and that the boundaries of masculinity were at times flexible and porous for those who ‘earned’ such leeway.141 By extension, this suggests that the vision of Nazi masculinity that has inspired the contemporary extreme-right is more extreme and martial than the reality of life in the Third Reich, and that the toxic traits so central to modern far-right masculinity are more a result of falling for propaganda than any real reflection of traditionalist norms. Künhe’s central thesis rests on the concept of “protean masculinity” – that is, a flexible and adaptable masculinity that incorporates elements traditionally coded as feminine within certain parameters. Much in line with the writings of Jünger – and Weisbrod’s interpretation of them – Künhe argues that violence and sacrifice were central to Nazi masculinity, but in contrast to Jünger’s ideas, he argued that so too were homosociality, the sharing of emotions, and nontypical expressions of manhood.142 This protean masculinity allowed different types of men within the Wermacht to establish their own male identities and to

140 Weisbrod and Selwyn, ‘Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism’. 141 Thomas Künhe, ‘Protean Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity: Soldiers in the Third Reich’, Central European History, Issue 51 (2018), 390-418. 142 Künhe, ‘Protean Masculinity’.

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“switch among different emotional and moral states without losing their manliness”.143 Crucially, argues Künhe, the concept of hegemonic masculinity relies on the “existence and rivalry of multiple conceptions of masculinity”.144 In other words, in order for the archetypical masculine men to be seen as such within the confines of a society – in this case within the Wermacht – other, contrasting models of masculinity must be present. Therefore in the context of the Army of the Third Reich, space was made for non-traditional or non-archetypal masculinities in order to show the archetypal masculinity of the Wermacht’s übermenschen in sharper relief. In contrast, in the context of the modern extreme-right often the vast majority or indeed all of the male members of violent groups aspire to fulfil the role of the übermencsh, forcing a gender- driven cycle of radicalization and violence as each member must ‘prove’ his manliness.

Crucially, Künhe notes that even those who are seen by contemporary far-right extremists to represent the pinnacle of Nazi manhood, such as the officers and elite soldiers of the Waffen SS, did not either see themselves as archetypically masculine or were insecure of their own masculinity, often adopting extreme violence as a means of compensating for their perceived failings as a Nazi man and reaching for the prescribed normative image of Nazi masculinity.145

Thus in a space in which all men see themselves as the übermenschian vanguard of a coming fascist revolution, the yardstick of masculinity against which all activists measure themselves is significantly longer – and more extreme. In order to stand out as the most manly member of a contemporary extreme-right group, men must be the most heavily armed, the most stereotypically masculine, and ultimately the most violent and self-sacrificing member of their already violent social circle. It is this culture which lends itself to self-radicalization and lone

143 Künhe, ‘Protean Masculinity’. 144 Künhe, ‘Protean Masculinity’. 145 Kunhe, ‘Protean Masculinity’.

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actor terrorism on the extreme-right, particularly in cases in which the perpetrator seemingly commits suicide-by-cop or falls to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. While the suicide bombing techniques of Salafist Islamist terrorism are almost non-existent on the far-right, the idea of a glorious, violent death is a prominent feature of violent extremist masculinity on the fascist fringe, and the ever-present threat of mass-shootings or bombings by the extreme right in the

United States and around the world is driven primarily by a need amongst extremists to prove their masculinity and gain the status of übermensch.

MASCULINITY AND RADICALIZATION

Far-right authors and thinkers knew the radicalizing power of this masculine insecurity, and throughout the twentieth century this cycle of desire to be the most masculine and reach the seemingly unattainable vision of martial masculinity amidst the already hyper-masculine milieu of far-right extremism was manipulated and deployed by those who sought to radicalize the movement towards violence. In particular, James Mason and both deployed masculine norms and expectations in order to promote violent action and sacrifice for

‘the cause’, pushing martyrdom as the ultimate expression of both masculinity and commitment to fascist ideals. The Turner Diaries, Hunter, and Mason’s Siege were powerful radicalizing forces for the extreme-right in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty- first, and each featured long missives on the nature of fascist masculinity and violent examples of idealized masculine activism.

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Pierce fetishized a particularly patriarchal, violent and primitive form of masculinity, and deliberately sought to attack the masculine insecurities of his readers in order to expose and mobilize a violent hero complex, and promoting its expression through unfettered masculine rage. Pierce’s construction of white masculinity relied on radicalization, racism and a sympathy for violence, but also on a ‘’. Pierce envisioned a racial ‘awakening’ in which the subject is either indoctrinated or self-indoctrinated with a racist and virulently anti-Semitic world-view. Pierce, somewhat narcissistically, saw himself as the sole authority on this worldview - despite the interwar fascist origins of many of the core principles underlying it – and so in his view his books were all the ‘enlightenment’ that was needed.146 Pierce saw his writing as a radicalizing and ‘enlightening’ force, and he expected the readers of The Turner Diaries and

Hunter to cast themselves as ‘enlightened’ revolutionary men in the mold of Earl Turner or

Oscar Yeager, rather than as the passive ‘Joe six-packs’ who, in Pierce’s view, made up the rest of the male population. The construction of masculinity in his novels was a deliberate and calculated method of radicalizing his readership, and preyed upon the masculine insecurities that

Michael Kimmel argues consistently drive young men towards far-right activism.147

Pierce’s books had such a violent impact upon the far-right largely due to the way in which they targeted and played upon masculine norms, mobilizing toxic conceptions of gender to promote violence. The construction of white masculinity in both Hunter and The Turner Diaries largely reflects the consensus across the post-war extreme-right spectrum regarding the role of the white man. Masculinity is portrayed as dominant, violent and radical, and Pierce’s white male

146 Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006. 147 Michael Kimmel, Healing From Hate: How Young Men Get Into - And Out Of – Violent Extremism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

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characters are most often written as part of a revolutionary ‘vanguard’, driving the ideological and activist momentum of their movement.148 The two protagonists—Oscar Yeager in Hunter and Earl Turner in The Turner Diaries—are portrayed as hyper masculine ‘alpha males’, who adhere largely to the accepted Aryan male archetype. Yeager is described as being ‘a tall, blond man… [with] deep-set, gray eyes… yellow stubble on his broad, heavy jaw… [and a] thin scar running diagonally across his left cheek’, very much in line with the Hitlerian construction of ideal masculinity.149

Interestingly, however, Pierce does not cast all white men as active and engaged, nor does he suggest that all white men have the potential to fulfil the masculine archetypes portrayed by

Turner and Yeager. In fact, Pierce suggests that this hyper-masculine vanguard is the exception rather than the rule, and that the rest of the male population are simply sheep that will follow the herd. In interviews with sociologist George Michael, Pierce articulated this view quite explicitly, stating that most ‘average white Americans’ were little more than ‘couch potatoes, ball game fans, Joe six packs and lemmings’.150 Pierce used the Gramscian notions of metapolitics and cultural hegemony – much like the contemporary ‘alt-right’151 - to further his separation of the vanguard and the rest of the white male population, describing a passive, easily influenced

148 Pierce often used the term ‘Vanguard’ despite its Leninist origins, even naming his press ‘National Vanguard’. This again points to the amalgamation and mutation of ideas from across the political and philosophical spectrum and the resultant ideological incoherence of the American extreme-right. For more information on Vanguardism and the Vanguard party, see V. I. Lenin, What is to be done?, pamphlet, 1902. 149 Pierce, Hunter, pg. 8; Gregory Maertz, ‘Eugenic Art: Hitler’s Utopian Aesthetic’, in Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman and Paul Stocker (eds), The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-45, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp 87-104. 150 George Michael, ‘The revolutionary model of Dr William L. Pierce’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 15:3 (2003), pg. 67. 151 Hermansson et al., The International Alt-Right, pp. 123-135.

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version of masculinity that was simply waiting to be led by the enlightened revolutionary bloc.

He often used the term ‘Lemmings’ to describe this vision of passive masculinity, saying:

In deciding what to believe, the lemming is interested only in what other

lemmings believe – or in what he thinks they believe. It doesn’t do any good at all

to try to change a lemming’s opinion by showing him factual evidence or by

appealing to his ideals. The only way to change a lemming’s opinion is to trick

him into believing that all other lemmings have changed their opinions.152

This view emerges clearly in Hunter, when Keller makes the distinction between ‘man and higher man,’ claiming that the average white man is simply an unconscious participant in the wider movement, preparing the way for ‘the Superman’ who will lead the revolutionary vanguard.153 This idea of lost or latent masculinity clearly built on the combined works of

Nietzsche and Julius Evola, whose respective ideas on the ‘übermensch’ and the ‘warrior caste’ were crucial elements in the formation of classical fascist masculinities.154 However, it is evident that Pierce anticipated that most ideologically sympathetic male readers of the book will see themselves in the position of Yeager rather than in the more passive sense, and his separation of

‘leaders and led’ was an attempt to mobilize toxic, violent masculinity in his readers, radicalizing them and fostering the delusional hero complex that contributes so starkly to radicalization in cases of violent lone-wolf attacks.

152 Hermansson et al., The International Alt-Right, pp. 123-135. 153 Pierce, Hunter, pg. 148. 154 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Berlin: Ernst Schmeitzner, 1885; Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography, London: Arktos, 2010; It is important to say here that the übermensch idea that is mobilized by the post-war far-right is not that of Nietzsche, but a version that finds its origins in Nazi-era misrepresentations of Nietzsche’s concept.

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Pierce actively sought to propagate and mobilize the violent hero-complex of far-right masculinity, promoting an idea of martyrdom and mass violence as the pinnacle of masculine expression. By offering a dichotomy between ‘couch potato’ and ‘Superman,’ he pioneered a tactic that would prove to be an effective and deadly means of radicalizing men towards violent extremism, offering two archetypical and dichotomous visions of masculinity and allowing the reader to choose where they stand. In an article in ’s White Aryan Resistance magazine, Pierce made a much more direct plea for violent activism, again calling out the

“inaction” of the majority of activists and promoting a violent vision of idealized racist masculinity. In the article Pierce argued that:

It is clear that if most White males would respond to their rage in a direct,

physical way, as do, then we would have no race problem, no Jewish

problem, no homosexual problem and no problem with White race traitors in

America. Our cities would be clean, decent, safe, and White once again after a

relatively brief period of bloodletting. The fact is, of course, that most White

males will not take direct, physical action against their racial enemies...Still it is

good that a few do, and that they act accordingly. Because they are so few,

however, their actions cannot win the war for us. We must have soldiers of other

kinds as well if we are to win. Ultimately, we will win the war only by killing our

enemies, not by any clever, indirect schemes which involve no personal risk.

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The impact of Pierce’s work on the far-right globally cannot be understated, and as a result this vision of far-right masculinity has become almost hegemonic among violent extremist groups such as the National Socialist Movement, Knights of the , and more recently the

Atomwaffen Division and their successors the National Socialist Order. What was once a means to radicalize young activists has become a staple of far-right masculinity, particularly among accelerationist groups, militias, and ‘Boogaloo’ movements, who often see themselves as the vanguard of a coming rightwing revolution.155 Similarly, the vision of idealized, violent masculinity has had a formative impact on the Incel movement, which is quickly becoming one of the most violent and dangerous ideologies facing the world today. Contrary to extreme-right activists, who seek to fulfill the archetypical far-right masculine role envisioned by Pierce, Incel ideology is built on the idea that its adherents can never fulfill this role. Incels mobilize and idealize the same Hitlerian vision of the strong-jawed alpha male, but see themselves as ‘betas’ or even ‘omegas’ who are inherently barred from reaching alpha status. Even Stormcels - Incels affiliated with the extreme-right - construct their own violent activism as ‘omega rage’, rather that the ‘righteous’ vanguard violence of the far-right lone wolf.156 Thus the far-right construction of masculinity can lead to violence, even for those men who do not see themselves as the ‘Superman’, but rather are expressing their rage at never being able to attain that title.

Critically for Pierce, Mason and the majority of men on the far-right, masculinity was also deeply and inherently racialized. White masculinity – and specifically the vision of white

155 Paul Jackson, ‘The New Man in Fascism Past and Present’, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, March 12 2020, https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2020/03/12/the-new-man-in-fascism-past-and-present/, accessed May 26, 2020; Robert Evans and Jason Wilson, ‘The Boogaloo Movement is not what you think’, Bellingcat, May 26, 2020, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/ Accessed May 26, 2020. 156 Incels: A Guide to Symbols and Terminology, Moonshot CVE report, May 2020.

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masculinity propagated by these groups – was seen as the hypermasculine norm, meanwhile racialized masculinities were discounted as effeminate, , or weak. This process is not unique to the extreme-right by any means, and has been a common propaganda tactic in times of war for generations. During both the first and second world wars American propaganda painted

German and Japanese men as gluttonous and effeminate respectively, whilst simultaneously propagating the image of the hyper-masculine, flag-draped American hero. Thus, Christina Jarvis argues, a heroic and self-sacrificing White American masculinity became the norm and the benchmark upon which the rest of the world would be measured throughout the rest of the century.157 The American military not only hyper-masculinized the bodies and personalities of their own soldiers during war, but entire generations of white American men who would go on to model their male expression on that of John Wayne, his penchant for white supremacy not excluded. Thus not only whiteness but martial whiteness came to be the norm, casting everything

– and everyone – else in opposition to it. For the extreme-right, this trend was simply exacerbated and amplified. In an environment in which violent machismo and a conspiracist, racist hero complex was endemic, the expression of white masculinity was amplified and the white supremacy of society’s masculine norms was simply made more explicit and ultimately more violent. As later chapters will explore, the casting of Black masculinity as inherently aberrant and threatening, or the vision of Jewish maleness as effeminate and devious, or the countless other racist visions of nonwhite masculinities portrayed by the extreme-right’s propaganda machine drove the rhetoric and violence of fascist activism not only in the United

States, but in Britain, South Africa, across Europe and even in India. White masculinity, and the

157 Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.

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comparison of all other masculinities to it, was and still is perhaps the single most important lynchpin holding together the violent white supremacist ideology of the far right.

BONEHEADS, HOOLIGANS, AND VIOLENT MASCULINITIES

Hypermasculinity and machismo-driven violence was present across the far-right spectrum in the latter half of the twentieth century, but the explicit masculine aesthetic of violence was less widespread. While for the traditional goose-stepping Nazi far-right or the hooded Klans, violence was something of an open secret, best committed anonymously and with plausible deniability so as to sustain the ‘respectable’ image of the group. For some groups however, violence was central to their expression and presentation of masculinity, and an overtly violent image was not only acceptable, but desirable. The expressions of this violent image varied greatly. On one end the burgeoning militia movement of the 1980s onwards – and especially in the wake of the Ruby

Ridge and Waco incidents of the mid 1990s – saw the open-carrying of firearms and militaristic organizing as markers of masculinity and key parts of the “remasculinization of America” in their own right.158 The trappings of violence – or the potential for it – were central to the vision of American masculinity that the militia movement sought to propagate, building off what they viewed as the traditionally violent and protective masculinity of the American frontier.

Since the inception of the United States the prevailing image of masculinity has been rugged, individualistic and protective. The image of the breadwinner and homesteader who could protect family and property against any threat was elementary in a nation founded on the principle of individual liberty, but which retained a strictly patriarchal social structure centered on the nuclear

158 Susan Jefford, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

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family.159 From the era of the American Revolution through westward expansion, the Civil War and into the long Twentieth Century, the American man was tasked with protecting - and potentially sacrificing himself for - his nation, his liberty and his family both on his home frontier and on increasingly far-flung battlefields. White American masculinity was founded on a vision of martial manliness and self-sacrifice, forged in near-perpetual war and refined on the frontier where it met with complementary visions of racial supremacy and nationalist exceptionalism. The social and political alchemy that occurred during the long nineteenth century in particular established a notably toxic concoction of racialized masculinities, perhaps best expressed by President Theodore Roosevelt, the man who many still consider to be the archetypical American ‘manly man’.160 It was Roosevelt’s promotion of the ‘strenuous life’ and

White manhood forged by struggle against indigenous peoples and foreign enemies that drove

American visions of model masculinity for generations, and which allowed the ‘frontier mentality’ to persist well beyond the completion of the USA’s continental conquest.161 This

Rooseveltian vision of the sporting outdoorsman who can provide for his family and fight for his nation still reigns supreme as the masculine archetype in many parts of the country, particularly in more rural spaces. It should be no surprise that these areas have also been hotspots of organized militia activity for the past thirty years, and where the individualistic, patriarchal vision of masculinity prevails, so too has the traditionally anti-government - and more recently self-styled ‘patriot’ - militia movement which adopts martiality and militarism as its primary expression of masculinity.

159 Jonathan Levinson, ‘The Masculine Ideal is Killing American Men’, OPB, March 14 2019, https://www.opb.org/news/article/toxic-masculinity-masculine-ideal-gun-violence/, accessed March 2, 2021. 160 Kathleen Dalton, ‘Finding Theodore Roosevelt: A Personal and Political Story’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 6, No. 4, (Oct. 2007), pp 363-383. 161 Karen R. Jones, Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West, Denver: University of Colorado Press, 2015.

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This distinctly American brand of right-wing masculinity was fertile ground for Pierce’s fascist masculinity to grow, and contributed to the rise of an equally distinctive American homo fascistus. The American fascist man held and indeed amplified the same rugged, individualistic and survivalist traits of frontier masculinity, but incorporated the violent martyr-complex and streak of genocidally violent white supremacism that was central to Nazi masculinity and was advocated by both Pierce and Mason. Furthermore, the American fascist man was also imbued with the trappings of gun culture and Second Amendment activism, which was itself again pushed by Pierce in both his novels.162 The firearm was central to the image of American fascist masculinity, and the idea of a confiscatory government taking the guns of American men was steeped in the language of emasculation and feminization. Indeed, the violent aesthetic of gun- ownership was central to masculinity on the American extreme-right, and represented the broader trend of masculinity and violence being tied together in a hyper-individualist, anti- government, survivalist vision of manhood..

On the other side of the spectrum, the rapidly evolving ‘skinhead’ movement had its own violent aesthetic that was rooted less in a traditionalist vision of masculinity and more in an anti- conformist, countercultural one. The skinhead movement – and the related ‘Oi!’ and hooligan movements – was a transatlantic (and indeed trans-European) counterculture that saw a number of cultural developments and manifestations from the 1960s through to the 1990s and beyond.

Critically, the skinhead movement was by no means heterogeneously racist, and actually found its roots in the Jamaican ‘rudeboy’ culture of 1960s Britain and the subsequent ‘two-tone’ subculture that galvanized around music and the aesthetic of working class, inter-racial

162 The back cover of the 1978 edition of The Turner Diaries features a header asking “What will you do when they come to take your guns?”. Confiscation conspiracy and the idea of the firearm as a symbol of freedom was a central theme across Pierce’s writings, and was tied inextricably to manliness and emasculation.

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cultural exchange. However while the non-racist and anti-racist culture flourished through the latter decades of the century – with S.H.A.R.P. leading the charge – sadly so too did the racist and neo-Nazi skinhead movement, which thrived on the working class image and pull-no- punches mindset of the rough and ready skin scene.163 For both racist and non-racist skinhead alike, however, masculinity was central to the image that the movement displayed. The skinny jeans, buzzed short hair and military jacket and were representative not only of a reaction against the conformity of mainstream culture, but, as Timothy Brown argues, against the feminization of masculinity brought about by the hippie movement in the 1960s and 1970s.164

The intersection between masculinity and a proud, working class identity went hand-in-hand, and the reinvigoration of hard-nosed manliness in reaction to the ‘soft’ middle class identity of the hippies and later the yuppies was central to the birth and growth of the broader skinhead scene.

For the racist skinhead movement – termed the ‘Boneheads’ by many on the anti-racist scene – this working class, masculine identity had one more central feature – Whiteness. The racist skinhead movement saw the white working man as the only valid symbol of their class identity, and viewed the multi-racialism of the anti-racist skinhead movement as representative of the

‘degeneration’ and betrayal of a multicultural society.

Violence was absolutely central to the masculine aesthetic of the racist skinhead subculture, and was often a condition of acceptance or advancement within the movement, particularly in the

United States and across Europe. This obsession with the aesthetic of violence was best

163 S.H.A.R.P. stands for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, one of the largest organizations of anti-racist skinheads globally since their founding in 1986. 164 Timothy Brown, ‘From England with Hate: Skinheads and “Nazi Rock” in Great Britain and Germany’, in Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton (eds.), Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present, New York: Berghan Books, 2011.

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encapsulated by the lace code, an unwritten but widely understood signifier of rank and allegiance within the skinhead scene. Doc Marten boots were a key element of the uniform for both racist and anti-racist skins, and the long, visible laces offered space for customization and unspoken communication between adherents to the subculture. While anti-racist and anti-fascist skinheads uniformly wore yellow laces, ‘White Power’ skinheads would wear white, red or blue laces to signify an informal but clear ‘rank’ within the movement. Newer members of the movement would traditionally start out with white laces and would have to “earn [their] reds” by shedding blood – usually that of racial or political ‘enemies’ - for the cause.165 Similarly, blue laces could be earned by taking the life of a police officer, and thus were reserved for the most hardened and violent skinheads.166 Thus violence was central to the visual culture of the skinhead movement, and was seen as a way of advancing and gaining seniority within the scene.

This transcended the meta-political and aesthetic realm and had very real, lasting impacts on people’s lives, perhaps most famously in the case of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian student who in 1988 was brutally murdered on the streets of Portland by a skinhead gang affiliated with Tom

Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance.167 Despite his fellow klansmen and Nazi’s disdain for the

“disorganized rabble of skinhead youths” now being linked to far-right activism in the media, during the 1980s Metzger came to see skinheads and their gangs as “the frontline warriors” of his white supremacist movement.168 Metzger and W.A.R. directly aligned themselves with the

“white mean machines” of the racist skinhead scene and travelled “round [sic] the nation organizing Skinheads to harass Blacks and Jews”, trying to stir up as much anger, resentment,

165 ‘Racist Skinhead Glossary – Red Laces’, Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting- hate/intelligence-report/2015/racist-skinhead-glossary, accessed 12/7/2020. 166 George Marshall, Spirit of ’69: A Skinhead Bible, Edinburgh: S.T. Publishing, 1991. 167 Joan Laatz, ‘Skinhead Admits to Racist Killing’, , May 2 1989, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 1, Folder 18. 168 , Letter to the Friends of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Nov 1, 1989, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 14, Folder 17.

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and excitement for violence as they could.169 Prior to the murder of Seraw Metzger’s group had distributed leaflets in Portland that read “The old ways are over. It's open season on n*****s, cops and capitalists, kill 'em and let the devil sort 'em out".170

Metzger and his son John, as well as a regular cohort of their skinhead followers - sought out platforms and opportunities to espouse their racist message to wider audiences, and were even given regular national platforms on network television, including appearances on the Whoopie

Goldberg Show, CNN’s Crossfire, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and a now infamous slot on

Geraldo in which a brawl broke out on-air and host Geraldo Rivera received a broken nose.171

The Geraldo episode – which inspired further skinhead street violence and was in itself a pure representation of the violent masculism of the movement – featured the younger Metzger,

Director of the Skinheads of the National White Resistance Michael Palasch, and

Director Bob Heick, giving all three participants carte blanche to air their racist and anti-Semitic views and conspiracy theories to a primetime audience. Aggressively using violent racist terms like “k*kes”, “Uncle Toms” and calling Adolf Hitler a “hero”, the three “young hatemongers” preached their deliberately inflammatory and racist gospel for twenty-eight minutes before civil- rights leader Roy Innis stood up in disgust and the violent brawl ensued.172 In a long-form exposé of the violent Skinhead scene in 1990, journalist Elinor Langer directly linked the murder of Seraw with the Geraldo incident, noting that in the immediate aftermath of the show’s airing

“skinhead activity in Portland reached a new pitch”, and that the murder occurred only a week

169 Morris Dees, Letter to the Friends of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 170 Morris Dees, Letter to the Friends of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 171 ‘Young Hate Mongers’, Geraldo, Paramount Domestic Television, aired Nov 5, 1988, transcript, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 30, Folder 6, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries. 172 ‘Young Hate Mongers’.

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later.173 Langer’s article claimed that the show inspired a meeting of the East Side gang in the city, during which they planned a dual strategy of violence and propaganda. Over the week that followed the group became increasingly “drunk on alcohol and racist ideas” as they partied, distributed W.A.R. newsletters, and committed increasingly violent attacks on Jewish and Black Portlanders, culminating in the fatal armed assault on Seraw in the early hours of

November 13th.174

It was clear that Metzger’s concerted propaganda campaign was contributing to a rising atmosphere of violence and hate on America’s streets, and skinhead gangs were becoming more organized, more ideological and more violent than ever before. Beatings, murders and vandalism linked to Skinhead gangs were being reported across the United States, and the often entirely innocent and unsuspecting victims of this violence ranged from fourteen year old boys to married couples with children.175 In an open letter to supporters of the Southern Poverty Law Center, founder Morris Dees outlined the growing problem of skinhead violence across the United

States. Noting that the center was aware of over “3000 Skinheads operating in 31 states”, Dees opined that these “angry young men blame[d] their own failures on Jews and minorities” and presented an imminent threat to security and stability in cities across the United States.176 The increasingly violent culture of the skinhead scene was inextricably tied to the vision of masculinity that Metzger and W.A.R. sought to propagate, and the curation of a martial

173 Elinor Langer, ‘The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today’, The Nation, July 16 1990, Tyler Bridges Papers, LaRC-1102, Box 2, Racists and the Reactionary Right. 174 Langer, ‘The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today’. 175 Morris Dees, Letter to the Friends of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Nov 1, 1989, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 14, Folder 18. 176 Morris Dees, Letter to the Friends of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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masculism was a key element in the radicalization of so many young men in the 1980s and

1990s.

The effectiveness of the American – and indeed International – skinhead movement was lauded by even those who did not advocate for their aesthetic or rhetoric of countercultural rebellion.

William Pierce saw the reckless vanguardism of the movement as a positive – if not overly organized or coherent – move toward violent revolution, and thus supported their actions.

However he hesitated to urge his readers to join the skinheads, instead pushing a more measured approach. Nonetheless, the murder of Mulugetta Seraw thrust the American racist skinhead movement into the eyes of the mainstream, and the broader extreme-right took every opportunity to capitalize on their publicity.

In the United Kingdom, the skinhead movement had been consistently in the eye of the public and the media since the 1970s, largely thanks to its ties to the emerging ‘casual’ culture that was bringing mob violence to the soccer stadium terraces and to the streets of Britain’s cities. The culture of became a natural recruiting ground for violent racist groups in the 1970s and 1980s, and the symbiotic relationship between firms and extremist organizations begot street violence on an unimaginable scale. ‘Ultra’ groups like Chelsea’s Headhunters and Millwall’s

Bushwackers had long-established ties to the National Front, British Movement, and Combat18, as well as Ulster loyalist paramilitary organizations such as and the Ulster Volunteer Force, the

Red Hand Commando, and the Ulster Defence Association.177 These groups saw the masculine rage of as the perfect energy which could be channeled away from sport

177 ‘Shaved for Battle: Skinheads Target American Youth’, Anti-Defamation League Special Report, 1987, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 14, Folder 18.

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and into the battle for race and nation, particularly during the long soccer-free summers in which many of these groups would perform most of their street demonstrations and marches – as well as the violence and vandalism that inevitably followed. In particular, far-right groups were very aware that the terraces were the perfect place to groom younger fans and prepare them for a life of violent extremism. Boys as young as ten would attend matches every week, and would be continuously exposed to the violence and vitriol of the hardcore supporters. These children were being conditioned to accept hooliganism and violence as the most valid expression of masculinity, making them prime targets for further radicalization into the racist extremist movement.178

This movement certainly wasn’t limited to Britain however, and the culture of politicized mob violence in soccer stadiums swept Europe throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, finding footholds in Germany, the Netherlands, and especially Italy. In his 2019 book, Ultra,

Tobias Jones explores the origins and modern manifestations of extreme politics and soccer fandom in Italy, explaining the long history of both far-right and far-left engagement with stadium violence.179 Contrasting the fascist imagery, Mussolini-worship, and racist violence of

Lazio’s Irriducibili with the community work, charitable engagement and antifascist praxis of the likes of Cosenza’s I Nuclei Sconvolti, Jones demonstrates the fallacy of making a direct link between football hooliganism and far-right engagement, instead suggesting that the far-right have managed to coopt the movement in some cases while abjectly failing to do so in others.180

178 ‘Lines to take – Link between extreme right wing and football hooliganism’, UK Government Report, nd., https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/100374/1539- disorder-football.pdf, accessed March 23, 2021; Richard Hester and Nick Pamment, ‘It’s become fashionable: Practitioner perspectives on football hooliganism involving young people’, International Journal of Police Science and Management, Vol. 22, No. 4 (August 2020), pp. 266-377. 179 Tobias Jones, Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football, London: Head of , 2019. 180 Jones, .

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Ultra organizations tend to be reflective of the communities that they emerge in, and in the traditionally leftist areas of Calabria in which support for Cosenza is common, it was always unlikely that far-right firms would find any foothold. In the spaces in which fascism does take a grip, however, it does so in an extremely violent way. The Ultra groups like the Irriducibili take their politics seriously, performing Roman salutes, flying flags featuring the silhouette of

Mussolini, and chanting racist slogans at players of color. Outside of the stadiums these groups often engage in organized violence against leftist organizations and minority communities, famously stabbing two Celtic fans in an Irish bar in Rome in 2019 in retaliation for an anti- fascist banner flown by the Scottish club’s supporters a month earlier.181 Violence and far-right politics in Italian football have gone hand in hand since the 1960s, and are often representative of broader trends in extremist politics and activism in the nation. This was reflected in the hooligan culture of countries across Europe and further afield, and cemented the violent symbiotic relationship between ideologically-driven violent extremist groups and hardcore soccer fandom.

The hypermasculine aesthetic and cultural appreciation for violence was a lingua franca for the skinhead and hooligan movements across national and continental borders, and the scene spread quickly across the globe in the 1980s and 90s. The music, fashion, and indeed politics of the racist skinhead movement found new ideological soil into which they could grow new roots in late- and post-Soviet eastern Europe, South Africa, Australasia, the Iberian Peninsula and across

Russia. The burgeoning Nazi Rock scene – spearheaded by and

Skrewdriver – paradoxically globalized the ultra-nationalist – and indeed anti-globalist – racist

181 ‘Celtic fans stabbed by masked men in Rome’, BBC News, 7 November 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- scotland-glasgow-west-50328537, accessed 24 February 2021; Richard Winton, ‘Celtic & Lazio both charged after Europa League game’, BBC Sport, 30 October 2019, https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/50239751, accessed 24 February 2021.

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skinhead movement, forming a truly global language of hate.182 Indeed, the racist skinhead movement was a major factor in the globalization of the far-right that allowed for the emergence of transnational terrorist organizations and global neo-fascist coordination to occur in the 21st century. By globalizing the language and iconography of hate, the skinhead movement sowed the seeds of neo-Nazism, allowing the modern movement to flourish in the well-fed cultural and ideological soil. Fundamental masculism and the uniquely skinhead vision of hegemonic masculinity propagated by this movement played a key role in its rapid spread and indeed in its uptake by groups across cultural and ideological boundaries. The language and aesthetic of a working class hypermasculinity was a lingua franca across the global rightwing counterculture, and offered a rare common ground upon which the new fascist identity could grow and further spread.

SUITS, SWASTIKAS AND SURVIVALISM: ‘RESPECTABLE’ MASCULINITIES AND

THE EXTREME-RIGHT

While the actions and aesthetic of the bonehead right were lauded by certain figures in the more mainstream movement, they were never respected. The masculine aesthetic of the skinhead scene was at odds with the vision of far-right manhood propagated by the Klan, the National Front, and

182 Brown, ‘From England with Hate’, pg. 121; Pete Simi & Barbara Brents, ‘An Extreme Response to Globalization: The Case of Racist Skinhead Youth’ in Michael Flynn and David C. Brotherton (eds.), Globalizing the Streets: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control, and Empowerment, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 185-202; ‘: They Got Down and Stayed With It’, New Dawn, Issue 2, c. 1986, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/004/38.

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non-skinhead factions of the neo-Nazi movement, and the skinheads were often seen as ‘useful idiots’ who could draw attention away from the real activism of the far-right both in the United

States and in the United Kingdom. For the broader extreme-right, masculinity wasn’t about a working-class aesthetic or a rough-and-ready approach to activism and violence, but more about middle-class ‘respectability’ and appropriate distance from violence to ensure plausible deniability. As future chapters will expand upon, the majority of far-right groups relied upon a carefully constructed victim narrative that painted their violence as defensive and retributive rather than proactive and hateful. The skinhead movement’s random acts of assault and murder were certainly entertaining for the intelligentsia of the far-right and the everyday Klansman, but the optics-focused long-game of constructed white victimhood was much more important to them than the limited damage that the skinhead movement could do, and the expression of white masculinity for the broader far-right reflected this strategic thinking.

Critical to this image was the idea of white purity – explored in greater depth in the following chapter, particularly in relation to white femininity – which drove much of the extreme-right’s optics campaign. Thinkers and groups on the extreme-right both in the United Kingdom and the

United States sought to associate whiteness with nature, contrasting the carefully constructed image of the peaceful white man with an image of violent men of color. For groups in Britain, the idea of ‘indigeneity’ was critical to promoting this image of an assault on whiteness, and the rhetoric of indigenous whiteness being both outbred and violently assaulted by a “rising tide of colour” relied – ironically – on an anti-colonial framework and the language of ‘invasion.183 The

183 Richard Verrall, ‘Policies to Meet the Rising Tide of Colour’, Spearhead, No. 101, Jan 1977, pp 6-7,10, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/013; ‘Our Roots: Tomorrow is Ours’, New Dawn, Issue 2, c. 1986, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/004/38.

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brand of masculinity that was tied to this carefully curated image could not be one of random drunken street violence, nor could it be one of massive political violence and terrorism. For groups like the English National Movement and the National Front who at various times attempted to use this framework, masculinity had to be primarily framed as spiritual, defensive, peaceful by default, and – at least in terms of the image they presented – potentially violent only as a last resort. This image bled into – and in many ways even inspired – the rise of eco-fascism and esoteric Nazi Nordicism, both of which portrayed whiteness as indigenous, in tune with nature, and ultimately as default. Meanwhile blackness was framed as an inherently foreign assault on the land and the “folk”.184 For the Young National Front, the claim of the white British to the land was rooted in the heritage of the Celts, Vikings, Angles and Saxons, and as such so was their vision of what white masculinity should be. This was grounded in an idea that the

“ancesters” [sic] of the white British “felt a oneness with something spiritual, something they could not see but knew was there. Something that they knew was right and just”, and that the modern white man should tap into the same, innate sense of connection to the land and to the

“folk” and commit himself to the resistance against the “decadent degenerate and materialistic society” that they saw as encroaching upon their God-given land.185 The language of pure indigeneity under attack was intended to give legitimacy to the violence perpetrated by the far- right, but it relied on restraint in order to be effective. The image was directly at odds with the brazen hypermasculinity of the skinhead movement, and as such the eco-fascist and esoteric Nazi movements tended to distance themselves from the “loutish” image and behavior of the British

Movement, , and the broader Bonehead culture.

184 In Britain the term “Folk” was used more often than the Germanic “Volk”. Folk was a more identifiably English term, and so was used by English and British Nationalists. Neo-Nazi groups and esoteric Nordicists in Britain would either use Volk or use Folk and Volk interchangeably. In America Volk was used almost exclusively. 185 ‘Our Roots’.

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Some took this ‘spiritual’ form of white nationalism to its logical extreme, ultimately rejecting

“modern society” outright and embracing a primitivist, survivalist lifestyle. Rooted in an utter contempt for “society in its modern chaotic form”, the ideology of primitivist survivalism took

Julius Evola’s idea of Revolt Against the Modern World literally and as gospel.186 At the core of this survivalist ideology was a form of masculine expression that incorporated elements from across the extremist spectrum, distilling the various strands of hegemonic masculine thought into a single idea that represented – in the eyes of the survivalist at least – the archetypal extreme- right manhood. Far-right survivalism was ultimately grounded in the connection to the earth most commonly associated with and esoteric pagan Nazism, the rhetoric of familial protection of frontier masculinity, the potential – if not the outright aesthetic – for violence of the violent extremist right, and the self-sufficient masculinity of the anti-government right.

Survivalist masculinity saw itself as ‘sensible’ and ‘respectable’ – in stark contrast to the tattooed boneheads and the cross-burning “Ku Klux Klowns” – and was grounded in a sense of anonymity and silent preparation.187 Survivalist writers speaking to broader extreme-right audiences – such as Dennis Mahon who regularly wrote in the pages of White Aryan Resistance magazine – urged readers to avoid the flagrant displays and ideological peacocking of more mainstream extremist movements, warning against the flying of flags, holding rallies, wearing obvious extremist insignia, or even greeting fellow extremists in an overtly fascist manner.188

The brand of masculinity espoused by Mahon and his fellow survivalist extremists relied less on

186 ‘The New Man’, The Crusader, Issue 4, c. 1997, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002; Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion and Social Order of the Kali Yuga, Rochester: Inner Traditions Publishing, 1995. 187 Dennis Mahon, ‘Make More Babies, Prepare to Survive’, White Aryan Resistance, vol. 12, no. 4 (May 1993), pg. 7, University of Northampton Archives and Special Collections, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 188 Mahon, ‘Make More Babies’.

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public displays of intimidation or random acts of ‘meaningless’ violence, and more on an expectation of and preparation for future catastrophic violence in which an armed white revolution would be made possible. The movement relied on an “Underground Armed Party” which would be ready at a moment’s notice to mobilize and engage in revolutionary violence once the time came to “bring down and burn Babylon the great”.189

Equally, the rhetoric of corrupt society and – critically – corrupt masculinity was a focal point for the conservative extreme-right, with which the survivalist faction had some significant ideological and religious overlap. For the ‘Christian’ far-right the corruption of white masculinity was most easily identified in hypersexuality and promiscuity, a trend which they even saw in some of the skinhead and street-based far-right groups. Masculinity within the conservative far-right milieu was defined – at least rhetorically – by restraint, family values and fidelity. Adultery, homosexuality, pedophilia, and pornography were all tied together as symptoms of a ‘degenerate’, hypersexualized form of masculinity which the ‘new man’ – or indeed the traditionalist man – would position himself against.190 Pornography in particular came in for a lot of criticism from the conservative extreme-right, and was seen as a corrupting influence designed to emasculate men and enslave women. It was, in fact, seen as a part of a broader anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which claimed that ZOG – Zionist Occupied Government

– was seeking to disrupt the white family and reduce white birthrates as a result. Far-right publications often published ‘proof’ of subliminal pornography being blasted into the household through advertising and traditional media, and saw sexual imagery in the most banal of images.

189 Mahon, ‘Make More Babies’. 190 The link between pedophilia, child abuse and violence will be explored in greater detail in a following chapter, while the extreme-right’s homophobic rhetoric and violence will be given its due attention in an additional chapter which will be added prior to publication as a monograph.

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In the International Third Position’s Northern Way magazine for example, an image of a

McDonalds Chicken McNugget being dipped in barbeque sauce was highlighted as containing subliminal pornography, with the editor claiming that the nugget looked “more like an ejaculating penis”. In the same feature the editor found “hidden male equipment” in an Oscar

Meyer’s cooked ham advertisement, and “sex messages” in Disney’s The Lion King.191

Despite the paranoia and ridiculousness of the claims made in Northern Way, however, the extreme-right’s anti-porn campaign was strong on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s as mass media and the internet began to rapidly and indiscriminately democratize information, and pornography became more readily accessible. The broader anti- pornography movement had popular support from across society, but only the far-right chose to focus on the impact that exposure to pornography had on men and their reproductive capabilities.

In the late 1990s Nationalism Today published a sweeping indictment of all pornography, arguing that the ‘softcore’ pornography of “Page 3 Girls” and the very worst exploitative child pornography imaginable were ultimately equal and indiscernible.192 The piece, entitled

‘Pornography’s Children: The Legacy of Soft Porn’, traced the emergence of child pornography back to Michelangelo’s nudes, claiming that the renaissance artist’s work represented “the thin end of the pornographic wedge”, reminiscing about an age in which “it was considered scandalous for a decent woman to show her knees in public”.193 The article deployed conspiratorial language to suggest that the pro-porn movement was attempting to normalize

191 ‘A Hidden Agenda?’, Northern Way, no. 4 (Spring 1997), Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002. 192 “Page 3 Girls” refers to the topless models who were featured on page 3 of some tabloid newspapers in the United Kingdom, most notably The Sun. 193 ‘Pornography’s Children: The Legacy of ‘Soft’ Porn’, Nationalism Today, c. 1998, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/003.

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“depravity and debauchery”, ultimately contributing towards the “rapid collapse” of European society by slowly saturating society with pornography, claiming that “our fish and chips are likely to be wrapped in Page 3 nudity”.194 In the latter paragraphs of the piece the author went to great lengths to specifically note the impact that pornography had on men, arguing that the idea of porn degrading women was “absurd… like arguing that a rape victim is the guilty party” since

“the bulk of this immoral industry is… aimed at men”.195 Ultimately the article argued that pornography gave men the psychological illusion of total sexual control while the powers that be systematically stripped them of true power and true control. Arguing that porn activated a

“caveman mentality” in the male psyche which gave them a “fleeting but addictive” sense of animalistic control, the author suggested that men were victimized and brainwashed into committing “rape, wife beating, financial bribery, or child abuse in an attempt to regain” this

‘high’.196 This is all, in the eyes of the author, part of a larger plan to destabilize the “most basic unit of society, then of nation”, the family.197 Toeing the same conspiratorial line as Great

Replacement theorists, the author ultimately argued that pornography, and by extension hypersexuality, was a tool being used to systematically erase the white family and halt the production of white British children. This article was by no means unique, and the same ideas that underpinned it have been commonplace across the far-right spectrum for decades. Most recently the Proud Boys came under the spotlight in 2017 when it was revealed that members were asked to swear off pornography and masturbation, instead requiring them to “refocus [their] energies toward making a connection with another person”.198 Again the impetus behind this

194 Pornography’s Children. 195 Pornography’s Children. 196 Pornography’s Children. 197 Pornography’s Children. 198 Lux Alptraum, ‘Why Are The Proud Boys So Obsessed With Not Masturbating?’, Medium, October 19, 2018, https://gen.medium.com/why-are-the-proud-boys-so-obsessed-with-masturbation-c9932364ebe2, accessed March 8, 2021.

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movement is rooted in white genocide myths and the idea that pornography was in some way a conspiracy to destabilize ‘Western’ manhood. Thus pornography played a key role in the moral imagination of the more conservative far-right, and was packed together with other offences ranging from adultery to child abuse. Masculinity was thus imbued, at least in some sections of the Christian far-right, with a strict moral code.

For extremists within the ultra-conservative milieu, failure to adhere to these strict moral tenets of masculinity was grounds for censure and exposure. Even the most prominent members of the various Ku Klux Klan groups, for instance, faced judgement and censure as a result of their hypersexual behavior. In 1979, whilst Grand of his recently-founded Knights of the Ku

Klux Klan (KKKK), came under intense criticism from within his organization for his “extraordinary desire for female attention”. Writing whilst himself the Grand Dragon of the

California chapter of the KKKK, Tom Metzger in a memorandum to members noted that the

“Klan [was] a family organization”, and that “others have attempted to clean up after each embarrassing episode” in Duke’s long line of sexual exploits.199 Metzger made clear that heterosexual desire was a central and acceptable element of Klan masculinity, noting that “on the surface [no] red-blooded Klansman could disagree” with Duke’s desire for sexual attention, however the problem, he noted, “was of who, where, and how”.200 In her own extensive musings on Metzger, Duke, the Klan and the Skinhead movement in the United States, Elinor Langer noted that Duke’s “womanizing” was common knowledge both inside and outside the racist extremist movement. Duke divorced Chloe – his wife of ten years – in 1984 after a string of

199 Tom Metzger, Memorandum, ‘Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’, Dec 4th, 1979, , Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 1, Folder 18. 200 Metzger, Memorandum.

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allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity, and had a notorious “difficulty in maintaining a fixed course”.201 Duke even pseudonomously published a sex manual that “educated” women on

“how to please men”, and Langer noted that despite his charismatic public persona, “in private relations he seem[ed] to leave a sense of uneasiness behind”.202 Duke’s sex-life seemed to be a source of much shame for the Klan and the broader white supremacist movement in the 1970s and 80s, and it was clear from Metzger’s statements that he had stepped outside the boundaries of acceptability. These boundaries of male sexuality within the extreme-right milieu were firmly set, and were grounded in a rhetoric of respectability and restraint. It was acceptable to have a hyperactive sexual drive, but it was expected to be channeled in a very distinct direction. The line between normal and abnormal sexuality in the more conservative factions of the extreme- right was seemingly very fine and very fragile.

MARTYRDOM, SACRIFICE, AND VIOLENT DEATH AS MASCULINITY

The final display of archetypal masculinity available to members of extreme-right groups was the most violent of all, and offered one last grasp at the titles of Homo Fascistus and übermensch for those who had failed to meet the standards of masculinity expected of a far-right extremist.

Martyrdom – or even an arrest leading to a death sentence – was seen as the purest expression of far-right masculinity, and was often the gateway to canonization and adoration from across the global far-right spectrum. The act of self-sacrificial terror was the ultimate radicalization success-story, and as such far-right publications, groups, thinkers and extremists more broadly

201 Langer, ‘The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today’. 202 Langer, The American Neo-Nazi Movement.

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promoted the idea of glorious martyrdom and celebrated those who achieved it. The idea of violent death as pure masculine expression was endemic in the original proto-fascist and fascist understanding of the male role, and Jünger wrote at great length on the “male yearning for death” that drove the war-fetish of Weimar and later the Third Reich.203 For Jünger, as for the extreme- right thinkers who followed him through the fascist age and into the modern era, masculine redemption could be found “only in the blood-frenzy of danger”, and in the dual act of destroying the body of an enemy and having one’s own body destroyed.204 This idea has persisted and evolved, moving the space of sacrifice from the battlefield to the streets, to churches, to prison cells and to anywhere an act of terror can be committed. The writings of

James Mason and William Pierce centered terror in the narrative of sacrifice and martyrdom, encouraging stochastic, random acts of violence that cause as much damage as physically possible. The “enemy” of Jünger’s glorious death is no longer a combatant, but people of color, inter-racial couples, women, journalists, politicians and anyone who happens to be caught in the violent path of an extremist who has reached the end of their radicalization journey.

The celebration of ‘martyrdom’ as the pinnacle of masculine expression by the far-right was not just rhetorical or theoretical, and extremist publications regularly published glowing obituaries of violent terrorists and mass murderers in their pages. Adopting the language of conflict and service, these magazines and newsletters celebrated the extremists they viewed as “warriors” who were “killed in action”. In 1984, the British Movement magazine, Final Conflict, lead with a front page that eulogized infamous American extremist Robert Jay Mathews, claiming that

“Robert died at the hands of the Zionist state he tried to overthrow” and that “one hundred

203 Weisbrod and Selwyn, ‘Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism’. 204 Weisbrod and Selwyn, ‘Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism’.

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[warriors] shall spring from the shadows to take his place”.205 Mathews’ group - named The

Order after an elite organization in The Turner Diaries – was an insurrectionist, separatist Nazi group who pursued a white homeland in the . During their brief reign of terror they committed multiple armed bank robberies and were responsible for the much publicized

1984 murder of radio talk show host in Denver, Colorado. In the United States,

Pierce’s National Vanguard heaped praise on Mathews and The Order for setting its “sights on a full-scale, armed revolution, ending with the purification of the US population and the institution of a race-based authoritarian government”. Pierce explicitly praised the willingness of Mathews and many of his organization for their willingness to “give his life in order to hurt [the Jews]”, asking if America was prepared for “a hundred good me ris[ing] to take Robert Mathews’ place”.206 Similarly Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph were lauded and sanctified by extremists across the spectrum, and have become icons and models upon whom new generations of extremists seek to model themselves.

In recent years the extreme-right landscape has been dominated by a new group of radicals whose death and martyrdom-centric view of masculinity defines their entire movement.

Although they find their roots in the late 1970s and 1980s, Siegekultur and rightwing accelerationism have only emerged as a legitimate terror threat within the last two decades.

Based primarily on the writings of James Mason, the ideology of the accelerationist right calls for a complete collapse of democracy hastened by a campaign of terror and sabotage that erodes public trust in the state and ultimately leads to either a civil war or a fascist revolution.207 While

205 ‘Robert Jay Mathews’, Final Conflict: Against Capitalism and Communism, Issue 3, 1984, p. 1, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/04/002. 206 Amy Solnin, William L. Pierce: Novelist of Hate, Anti Defamation League Research Report, January 1995. 207 Mason, Siege.

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the ideology has been influential across the extremist spectrum, it has particularly been seen in the ideas and actions of groups like The Base, Atomwaffen Division, the Order of Nine Angels, and most recently, the National Socialist Order.208 These groups are more inherently violent and more inherently male than many of the extreme-right’s past iterations, and their ideology promotes a vision of masculinity that is intrinsically suicidal or self-sacrificial, more akin to the masculine ideology of Islamist extremism than previous expressions of fascist manhood. The accelerationist right sees being killed in the act of killing as the ultimate expression of masculinity, and a pseudo-apocalyptic societal collapse as a masculine space in which the untapped potential of the white man can be unleashed.209 It combines the violence of the white supremacist right, the survivalism of the anti-government right, the technophobia and regressiveness of the eco-fascist movement, and the nihilism of a millenarian cult to create a new vision of far-right masculinity that can only fully express itself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, hinging masculinity and manliness upon deadly violence so devastating that it leads ultimately to revolution and collapse. This ideology is not without precendent, and similarities can be found in the writings of Jünger and other Nazi theorists who believed in the esoteric value of war and death. Jünger himself wrote about the new German man as a “metaphysical rebel who

[sought] his divinity in the secular apocalypse of the battlefield and his redemption in a pleasurable sacrificial death”.210 Without a natural battlefield, adherents to the Jügerian school of fundamentalist masculinity and its more abstract ideological offshoots found themselves creating new battlefields through terrorism and chaotic random violence, searching for their sacrificial death in a society that rejects violence rather than embracing it. Accelerationists then present a

208 Simon Purdue, ‘The New Face of Terror in the United States’, OpenDemocracy, 29 October 2020, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/new-face-terror-us/, accessed February 16, 2021. 209 Mason, Seige. 210 Jünger, Storm of Steel, pg. 31.

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trend in fundamental masculism that leans further towards terror and violence than perhaps any ideology that precedes it. The masculine ideology of the new extreme-right relies on a metaphysical, nihilistic relationship with – and ultimately an enthusiastic embrace of – violence and death, making it more dangerous than ever before.

CONCLUSION

Masculinity lies at the heart of far-right ideology, culture, and – crucially – violence. Since the conception of proto-fascist ideology in the late 19th century the masculine aesthetic has been the lynchpin upon which the ultranationalism, racism, militarism and esotericism of the rightward extreme has rested, and throughout the development of fascism and post-war extreme-right ideologies, it has remained central. Masculinity has acted as propaganda, as a tool for radicalization, as a justification for violence, and as something akin to a religion. The ‘fascist new man’ as we know him today was a vision constructed by thinkers across the fascist world in the inter-war period, and came to represent their vision not only of manhood, but of society as a whole. The fascist man was muscular, stoic, violent, and cold. He protected his family, his race, and his nation, and he would not hesitate to kill in the pursuit of glory for any or all of the three.

He represented the same hegemonic masculine values present in western democratic societies through the middle of the twentieth century, but took them to a more extreme, more violent, and more severe level, representative of the extremism, violence and severity of the fascist state itself. For , Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and the various competing fascist forces vying for power in Romania, the rejuvenation of the nation began with the rejuvenation of the body politic and specifically of the German, Italian, Spanish or Romanian man. The man

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represented the health and vitality of the nation, as well as its military might. After all, for fascists an army was only as good as the men fighting in its ranks and a race as good as the virility of its men.

Thinkers like William Pierce and James Mason have identified the power of hegemonic masculinity in their extremist milieu, and have mobilized it as a powerful radicalizing tool.

Identifying the violent potential of masculine insecurity, these writers have promoted the idea of a dichotomy between a slovenly, lazy “couch potato” contributing to a genetic and racial decline, and an unrealistically masculine, ultra-violent “hero” willing to give up his life for the white race. They mobilized and warped the concept of the übermensch to radicalize young men towards violence, convincing them that terrorism was the only path to true masculine redemption. We have seen the deadly impact of radicalized masculinity time and time again, from Oklahoma City to Charleston to Christchurch. The power of the masculine fear of being seen as feminine or insufficient has taken far more lives than any ideology, and has inspired acts of horrifying violence both from the racist right and from the burgeoning male supremacist movement.

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PART TWO

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“Tomorrow Belongs to Her”: Women’s Violent Activism on the Extreme-Right211

“Hail Women Warriors!” – White Aryan Resistance, c. 1983212

“It is who hold the most extreme right-wing views – and they are silently preparing the ground for a terrible new state” – The Sunday Times, 1992213

“Women make the most excellent fanatics but they have to be properly motivated and LED” – James Mason, Siege214

Violence is central to extreme-right organizing. While there can be and often is ideological overlap across the far-right of the political spectrum, it is violence that ultimately sets the extreme-right apart from the populists, the radical-right parties, and the reactionary conservative movements that dot the political landscape. It is violence that defines these groups as extremist, and it is the relationship of these groups to violence and terrorism that makes them uniquely dangerous and that warrants their inclusion in this study. The neo-Nazi, fascist, third-positionist and accelerationist groups that have thus far been discussed all place violence at the center of their program, and whether it be pitched street battles, sporadic hate crimes or stochastic anti- government or racially motivated terrorism, all have used violence as a vehicle for their message of hate.

211 Nicholas Farrell, ‘Portrait of an Ordinary Housewife’, Unidentified UK Publication, c. 1990, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 212 White Aryan Resistance, no. 2, Vol. 8, c. 1983, pg. 1, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 213 Christine Toomey, ‘Women dreaming of Fourth Reich swell German neo-Nazi ranks’, The Sunday Times, December 13, 1992, Searchlight Collection, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/00. 214 Mason, Siege.

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For many in the movement violence was seen as a man’s role, however. As the previous chapters of this study have outlined, women were expected to play supporting roles, have as many white children as possible, or focus on propaganda and recruitment while spaces of violence – whether they be rallies at which groups would either protest or act as a security detail, in underground terror cells, or at organized confrontations with antifascists or other far-right groups – were the reserve of the male membership. The leaders of many violent extreme-right groups sought to limit women’s exposure to violence as much as possible, and used group-affiliated publications to emphasize the acceptable female roles and responsibilities within the movement. Naturally, this was not always received well by the female members of these groups. For many recruits both male and female violence was a selling point for the extreme-right, and the pursuit of

‘action’ is what drove many women away from traditional radical-right activism and towards explicitly violent extremist groups. As such, the limitation and proscription of women’s violent activism by male extremists was often a site of conflict and contestation on the extreme-right, and women in the movement sought to forge their own pathways to violence and justify their inclusion in the violent activities of their respective groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

This chapter will explore this contested space. By analyzing the language and imagery used both by those advocating against women’s engagement with violence and by those advocating for it, I will assess the extent to which women in extreme-right groups and movements were able to pursue their own violent path despite the limitations placed on them by the often restrictive gender norms of their ideology. I will explore the ways in which male members and more conservative, senior female members of these groups attempted to quell the violent impulse of

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younger women in the movement, and how this funneled many of these younger activists away from starched-collar neo-Nazism into the skinhead and street-gang scene.

Women’s engagement with far-right violence has been relatively understudied by scholars, despite numerous high-profile cases of female extremists being directly involved in violence and terrorism – for example, Beate Zschäpe in Germany and an abundance of female operatives within the United States’ violent anti-abortion movement. Indeed, even in the broader field of terrorism studies the role of women in violent extremism was left relatively untouched for many years, leading Sylvia Schraut and Klaus Weinhauer to claim in 2014 that “gender did not seem to be a suitable analytical category to analyze terrorism or political violence” throughout the twentieth century, despite the consistent engagement of women in terrorist activities – in the words of Gentry and Sjoberg – “long before it was popular to pay attention to them”.215

Recently, however, some scholars have begun to address the potential threat that female extremists present, decentering masculinity from discussions of violence and acknowledging the increasingly important, violent role that women play and have played within the extreme-right ecosystem over the last fifty years. Spurred on by the growing literature on women’s engagement with violent Jihadism scholarly analysis of women’s engagement with violence on the far-right is emerging as a serious and necessary field.216 However ground is still to be gained, and in a

215 Sylvia Schraut and Klaus Weinhauer, ‘Terrorism, Gender, and History – Introduction’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2014, Special Issue: Terrorism, Gender, and History, pp. 7- 45; Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, ‘The Gendering of Women’s Terrorism’ in Sjoberg and Gentry (eds.), Women, Gender, and Terrorism, Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2011. 216 See Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, ‘It’s Complicated: Looking Closely at Women in Violent Extremism’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 2, (Summer/Fall 2016), pp. 23-30; Mia Melissa Bloom, ‘Death Becomes Her: The Changing Nature of Women’s Role in Terror’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 2010), pp. 91-98; Amanda M. Spencer, ‘The Hidden Face of Terrorism: An Analysis of the Women in ’, Journal of Strategic Security, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2016), Special Issue: Emerging Threats, pp. 74-98; Mia M. Bloom and Hilary Matfess, ‘Women as Symbols and Swords in Boko Haram’s Terror’, PRISM, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2016), Women, Peace & Inclusive Security, pp. 104-121.

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comprehensive, 45 page bibliography of women in terrorism published in Perspectives on

Terrorism in 2020, only one of the hundreds of entries dealt explicitly with women and the far- right.217

The few notable exceptions, however, have contributed greatly to the field of far-right studies, and have offered vital context on the radicalization and violence of extremist racist women.

Kristy Campion – in a broader analysis of the role of women in both the extreme-right and radical-right spheres – examined the patterns of violence associated with female extremists, noting some key trends. Women, Campion argued, were unlikely to engage in what has been termed ‘lone wolf’ violence or ‘lone actor terrorism’ – itself a contested framing in the academic field of terrorism and political violence.218 Instead, women who engaged in violence were most likely to do so either as part of a group or a “two-person dyad”.219 That fact should not undermine the fact that women actively and regularly participated in extremist violence both in the United States and around the world, and Campion analyzed at least eighteen high profile cases in which women engaged in or planned acts of terrorism in support of a rightwing political cause between 1967 and 2019, including but not limited to acts of arson, murder, and bombing.220 Among these cases there was little consistency in terms of group or ideological affiliation, with female terrorists coming from across the extremist spectrum. Even the more

217 Judith Tinnes, ‘Bibliography: Women and Terrorism’, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 14, No. 2, (April 2020), pp. 155-201. 218 For some discussion on the issue of ‘lone wolf’ or ‘lone actor’ terrorism, see Agnes Hankiss, ‘The Legend of the Lone Wolf’, Journal of Strategic Security, Vol. 11, No. 2, (Summer 2018), pp. 54-72; Jan Leenars and Alastair Reed, ‘Understanding Lone Wolves: Towards a Theoretical Framework for Comparative Analysis’, International Centre for Counter-Terrorism Report, 2016; Petter Nesser, ‘Research Note: Single Actor Terrorism: Scope, Characteristics and Explanations’, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 6, No. 6, (December 2012), pp. 61-73. 219 Kristy Campion, ‘Women in the Extreme and Radical Right: Forms of Participation and their Implications’, Social Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 149, (August 2020). 220 Campion, Women in the Extreme and Radical Right, pg. 6.

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traditionally patriarchal and male-dominated groups – such as Klan groups and the Christian

Identity movement – produced female terrorists willing to kill, and indeed die, for their cause.221

Kathleen Blee’s earlier examination of women in organized racist terrorism further illuminated these trends, noting that women in extremist racist groups in the United States were significantly less likely than men to engage in anti-state or anti-government violence, but were marginally more likely than men to engage in racist street violence against minority groups or individuals.222

Both Campion and Blee have demonstrated in their work that women’s violent engagement with far-right ideology has not only been historically significant, but has followed clear patterns of radicalization and execution that can be traced and possibly even countered. The framework that both scholars have offered can shed light on the otherwise seemingly sporadic nature of historical cases of women’s far-right violence, and offer key insight into motivations.

A VARIED PICTURE OF WOMEN’S ACTIVISM

In order to fully understand the nature of women’s violent activism on the far-right in Britain and the United States, it is crucial to understand how violent femininity was constructed by English- language thinkers and ‘intellectuals’ within the milieu, as widely circulated writing was immensely influential in far-right subcultures and groups through the latter half of the twentieth century. Once again, the blueprints for activism set out by William Luther Pierce are a key clue to unpacking the historical gender politics of extreme-right engagement. While Pierce, and the far-right at large, has been fairly consistent in the construction and prescription of ideal

221 Campion, Women in the Extreme and Radical Right, pg. 7. 222 Kathleen M. Blee, ‘Women and Organized Racial Terrorism in the United States’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 28, No. 5 (2005), pp. 421-433.

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masculinity, attitudes towards white femininity are a lot more varied and in many cases contradictory. It is important to say here, that despite the popular assumption that the extreme- right is an almost exclusively male milieu, women have played crucial roles, and have in many cases reached the highest echelons of power and influence within these movements. Within the

British extreme-right, and the National Socialist Group (NSG) specifically, French socialite

Françiose Dior was a central figure. Not only did she fund the movement, but took an active role in the day-to-day functions of the organization, taking it as a personal mission to grow the group and bring more far-right activists under the Nazi banner.223 Also heavily involved was Pearl

Mudie, who rose to the position of ‘Lady Officer’ and became a key member of the organization’s small and influential inner circle. Her importance to the group was exemplified by her being one of three signatories on all official documentation that the group produced.224

Furthermore, one of the key philosophers in the formulation of post-war extreme-right ideology, and a close associate of Dior’s, was Savitri Devi. Devi, born in France to Greek and English parents, became the foremost proponent of spiritual national , bringing together the ideas of Hinduism, Occultism and Nazism to develop the New Age extreme-right ideology adopted by many Neo-Nazi groups. This is not to mention the many female grassroots activists who drove the movements in Britain, the United States and South Africa. Women, as Kathleen

Blee has shown in her own work, are crucial to the far-right both in ideology and in practice, and as such the construction of femininity is an important feature of extreme-right identity formation.225 The image of the archetypal feminine role traverses a spectrum from the violent skingirl activist through to the silent-until-spoken-to stay at home wife, and even within specific

223 Letter from Colin Jordan to ‘Mr. Courtney’ regarding Francoise Dior, 14 Dec. 1968, Searchlight Collection, National Socialist Group Letters, SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/001. 224 Searchlight Collection, National Socialist Group Letters, SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/001. 225 Blee, Inside Organized Racism.

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groups or ideological niches there can be dramatically varied expectations the role that women are expected to fulfill. This can be seen even within Pierce’s writing. While in The Turner

Diaries women are portrayed in much more activist roles- with the cover of the 1978 edition showing a woman pointing a handgun – in Hunter entire chapters are dedicated to outlining

Pierce’s vision of the domestic, explicitly non-violent role of women within the movement.

The two primary female characters in Pierce’s books are named Katherine and Adelaide, in The

Turner Diaries and Hunter respectively. In Katherine we see a steady evolution from a support role to a much more activist one, with Katherine herself stating that she “had no intention… of being nothing but a cook and a housekeeper”, and agitating to take up a more militaristic and active role in group operations.226 In the early stages of the novel we see her primarily fulfilling a support role, assisting the male members of the group by providing ‘makeup and disguise’, before taking a more active role in the execution of militaristic group activity by coordinating and guiding mortar attacks.227 Towards the end of the book we see both Katherine and another major female character, Carol, engaging actively in gunfights, robbing banks, and playing crucial, active roles in revolutionary activity.228 Nonetheless, Katherine is described as being

“affectionate, sensitive, and really very feminine”, suggesting that femininity and activism were not viewed as at odds with one another by Pierce.

Adelaide however, is portrayed in a much more passive role, and Yeager explicitly states that while he sees her as “a bright girl”, he saw it as a bad decision to bring her completely into the

226 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pg. 45. 227 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pp. 42, 65. 228 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pp. 89, 108.

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fold of his violent activity, justifying it by referring to ‘psychic differences’ between the sexes.

Yeager claims that the female ‘mental world was smaller, the horizon closer’, and that women were incapable of seeing the bigger picture and ‘mapping world-historical vistas’, making them unsuitable for full-scale revolutionary activism.229 Much of the first half of the book describes

Yeager debating how much of his violent racism should be revealed to Adelaide, and while he eventually brings her into the fold of the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign that the group run, she never actively engages in activist activity herself, consistently acting as little other than a vehicle for the expression of Yeager’s own inner monologue. Throughout the novel female characters are presented much like Adelaide, in that they are passive, supporting characters at best, or symbolic victims of rape and murder and worst. The activism and violence in Hunter is left predominantly to the male characters, unlike The Turner Diaries in which Katherine and other female protagonists perpetrate acts of violent activism on a fairly regular basis. In fact, in

Hunter, Pierce offers an extended and deeply anti-feminist inner monologue in which Yeager explicitly concludes that ‘women aren’t ready to go into combat yet’, decrying the feminist movement for its denial of ‘natural differences between the sexes’.230 This perhaps represents

Pierce’s own shifting perceptions of gender and racist activism, suggesting that, in terms of the role of women at least, he had become more conservative and more misogynistic in the ten years between each book’s publication, and had come to believe that although women had an important symbolic role within the white-supremacist movement, they could not engage in its more violent activities.

VIOLENCE AS HOUSEWORK

229 Pierce, Hunter, pp. 51-53. 230 Pierce, Hunter, pg. 50.

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For the traditional neo-Nazi groups who subscribed to the more mystical and pagan aesthetic, women’s violent activism carefully constructed to match the spiritual and esoteric understanding of femininity, and the ultra-conservative vision of a woman’s role within the movement. In these circles, violence was often portrayed as something used only to protect or defend the white race and their community, rather than as a necessary condition of membership as it was in many street gangs. These groups tended also to subscribe to much more conservative gender norms, and the role of women was restricted to the domestic and procreative sphere. Thus for women to justify their involvement in violent racist activism they had to mobilize a language and symbology more palatable to the men of the movement. Most often, this came in the form of the Odinist or Pagan mythology that underpinned the ideological worldview of these groups, and specifically mobilized the imagery of the ‘Valkyrie’. Valkyries were a staple of Norse mythology, and were presented as mystic female figures who went to battle alongside the Norse warriors and chose which of the warriors died in glory, transporting them to Valhalla.231 In the bastardized version of Nordic mythology embraced by contemporary neo-Nazi groups, the role of the Valkyrie has come to represent, more simply, a female warrior who fought side by side with Norsemen, and has been used in women-produced publications to justify the involvement of female activists in violence. One such example can be found in the appropriately-named Valkyrie magazine, produced by the British Patriotic Women’s League in the early 1990s. In the first edition of the magazine, a poem entitled ‘Let the Valkyrie ride by the White man’s side’ articulated the view of the editors on women’s violent activism.232 Starting out by claiming that ‘the weapons of …

231 Carolyne Larrington (trans.), The Poetic Edda, New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999, pg. 57. 232 ‘Let the Valkyrie ride by the White man’s side and sing the racial song’, Valkyrie, Issue 1, c. 1990, pg. 3, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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women have been shackled and chained too long’, the poem argued that the power of women was being restrained by domesticating and confining gender norms, and that White women could offer new weaponry to the racist cause. Specifically arguing that ‘the mind of women can be clear and sharp with a perception men don’t know’, the author mobilized long-standing tropes of mystic, wise womanhood to argue that women could assume a more tactical battlefield role.233

The poet mobilized the imagery of the Celtic Briton queen Boudicea to argue this point further, celebrating the ‘teenage girl’ who ‘conquered [Caesar] and his world with naught but feminine wiles’, again alluding to the spiritual and mystic understanding of womanhood. This continued as the author went as far as to suggest that the violent power of men found its origin in the mystical powers of women, arguing that the ‘ego of a man can be … as fragile as delicate flowers’, and that until women ‘let [men’s] powers flow’ it was ‘not in [their] nature to stand against the throng’, claiming that only when ‘the Valkyrie rides by the White man’s side’ can the cause reach its full potential.234 The poet argued a clear case for women’s involvement in the

‘battles’ fought by their male counterparts, mobilizing the mystic vision of femininity that aligned with the Odinist or paganist ideas upon which the movement’s worldview was built in order to make the argument more palatable and acceptable to the predominantly male leaders of the movement.

Even among the more radically conservative groups in the United States there seemed to be some space made for women’s violent activism, even if only in defense of the home or in the case of all-out war. In an interview with Lynn Metzger, Dorothy M. Miles – wife of former KKK grand dragon and prominent Christian Identity leader Bob Miles – made her own case for the

233 ‘Let the Valkyrie ride’. 234 ‘Let the Valkyrie ride’.

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necessity of violence, citing tradition and Nordic lore. “In the ancient responsibilities”, Miles claimed, “equally both man and woman are fighters in defense of their family and clan”. While making very clear that “each sex has values different to each other” and that women should spire to “be the natural woman”, Miles found space for women to engage in the violent defense of family and even race based on what she saw as ancient precedent.235 Similarly, in R.J. Hoy’s

1985 profile of Klan-affiliated groups in Arkansas by New Nation magazine, the author highlighted what he called ‘The Women’s War’.236 Predictably, the article began with a focus on what could be considered ‘traditional’ women’s activism, centering on the mobilization and politicization of motherhood and ‘weaponized’ reproduction. This ‘New Right’ style of Phyllis

Schlafly-esque activism was mostly rhetorical and explicitly non-violent.237 It mobilized a patriarchal view of gender that saw women as advocates for their children and men as the ultimate ‘protectors’ who could resort to violence if necessary. The images on the first page of the article focused on the anti-busing activism, pro-life rallies and school textbook protests led by “White Middle American Women”, painting women’s rightwing activism as exclusively maternal.238 The article noted that “Liberalism’s attack on the family and traditional moral values” had radicalized and mobilized white women to protect their sphere, portraying conservative women as the peaceful but relentless gatekeepers of morality and family values, very much in line with the anti-feminist vision of femininity that was so pervasive on the right during the 1970s and 1980s. However, the article soon took a more radical turn, arguing at the end of the first page that these women “may very well turn to more extreme measures” to

235 Lynn Metzger, ‘Dorothy M. Miles’, White Aryan Resistance, No. 2, Vol. 8, c. 1983, pg. 1, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 236 R.J. Hoy, ‘The Women’s War’, New Nation, Summer 1985, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 237 Gillespie MacRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade, Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2005. 238 Hoy, ‘The Women’s War’.

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“redress their grievances”.239 As the article continued it became clear what these extreme measures would looks like, and the following pages contained pictures of women “preparing for the Red Dawn” by learning to shoot long rifles, donning neo-Nazi National Alliance apparel and taking survivalist training courses. The author - who had initially seemed somewhat sympathetic to the New Right – claimed that the traditional form of neo-Conservative activism would “fail to stop America’s decline” and that the militant survivalist faction was better-prepared for what he saw as the imminent “social, economic and political collapse” brought about by liberalism and the coming communist threat. Lauding the White women who were joining the militant cause in

“large numbers” and who were preparing to “defend and provide for themselves”, Hoy made the case that women of the right should arm themselves and prepare to fight to preserve White supremacy and rise up against the “present-day Tower of Babel” that he believed America had become.

Unsurprisingly, however, this language of violent revolt was still couched in an essentialist, deeply patriarchal and family-focused understanding of women’s rightwing activism, and Hoy made the insipid and well-trodden argument that nationalism could only win female support if it committed to “defending the institution of the family and by addressing the fears of women that society is becoming unstable”. Citing “soaring” divorce rates, venereal disease, rising abortion rates and homosexuality, Hoy argued that the disruption of the “family space” was the only force that had the power to radicalize women towards violence, neglecting to include the perspective of any activist women that might unsettle this understanding.240 Despite including images of

European skinhead women in his article, Hoy refused to acknowledge the unique social factors

239 Hoy. ‘The Women’s War’. 240 Hoy, ‘The Women’s War’.

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and dissatisfaction with gender roles that often led women into fascist street movements. Instead he again argued that the “liberal destruction of the family” was the sole radicalizing factor for female activists, belying the myriad factors that drove far-right women towards violent action.

This same theme of self-defense as a domestic duty was common in female-run magazines like

White Sisters, and was generally included as one in a list of skills that was dominated by more

‘traditionally feminine’ duties like “first aid… and home gardening”.241 It was clear that in order for female activists to justify their combat training they felt compelled to frame it as a domestic role, and violence was often constructed as a defense of the home – i.e. the female sphere. Hoy’s article demonstrated the space that was opening up for women on even the traditionalist extreme- right, but crucially highlighted the patriarchal gatekeeping that remains to this day. Echoing the view of many Klan and Neo-Nazi groups Hoy argued that women should be armed, trained and ready for violence, but that violence should only be necessary in defense of the domestic sphere and the patriarchal family structure, which itself was at odds with real-life cases in which women were radicalized to violence.

Other activists had differing perspectives however, and some men in the movement saw a more coherent and active violent role for White racist women. The husband of the Aryan Women’s

League’s founder took to the columns of ‘White Aryan Resistance’ to defend his wife’s new organization, clearly arguing that women’s racist activism could and should be as violent as men’s. The article, entitled ‘From a Man’s Point of View’, argued in offensively racist, misogynist and homophobic terms that women’s organized racist activism was a central element of the ongoing race war, and that involvement in violent white supremacy was the best antidote

241 ‘What is the Aryan Women’s League?’, White Sisters, c. 1985, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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to the “Jew d*ke-we-hate-White males type of deal” that he saw as being the scourge of White womanhood.242 Instead, the author argued, White women should be “auxiliary warriors [who] wage major campaigns against the anti-White women as a whole, and especially against the … women’s action groups”. Suggesting that it was the place of women to use violence against other women, he argued that “male warriors would look ridiculous counterdemonstrating [sic] and beating up women d*kes that say we oppress them”, calling for White supremacist women to take up the fight by violently engaging with progressive women’s movements.243 The author argued that the optics of a feminist movement being violently assaulted by men would be damaging to the White supremacist cause, so by mobilizing women he believed that his movement could pursue their violent anti-feminist agenda whilst maintaining some degree of legitimacy in the public eye. In this case the violence of female activists was not limited to the domestic sphere, and street action was actively promoted. However, the violent role of female racists was seemingly restricted to anti-woman and anti-feminist action, and there was no suggestion of arming women for deadly violence. The core point of the piece, however, was to radicalize women toward a more active and violent involvement in the racist crusade, inviting a female readership to engage less in homemaking and more in street action.

The author also sought to legitimize women’s activism in the eyes of his male readership, switching tone part-way through the article and embracing a more male-centered viewpoint. His central argument rested on his perspective that “White racially conscious women are most beautiful when they are in battle”, sexualizing women’s activism and playing to his male

242 ‘From a Man’s Point of View’, White Aryan Resistance, Vol. 8, No. 4, c. 1990, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007 243 ‘From a Man’s Point of View’.

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readership’s lasciviousness and hypersexualized vision of White femininity.244 He also sought to tap into the masculine insecurity of many male racists and mobilize hegemonic visions of masculinity by arguing that “any man who feels threatened by his woman if she wages a few battles of her own might as well hang it up because he is no man at all, let alone a White

Warrior”, going on to claim that “men who enslave and oppress their women are egotistical losers and “boyish” inside”.245 The author believed that women had an important role to play in the violent agenda of the far-right, and sought to ensure that it was not limited by male activists who confined their partners to the domestic sphere. By actively mobilizing the language of masculine insecurity he sought to destabilize the restrictive gender balance of more conservative groups, and frame a violent partnership between man and wife as the ultimate co-expression of masculinity and femininity. Importantly, however, this was a balance above all else, and the author made clear that he did not support a feminist agenda or any swing ‘too far’ in the direction of women’s rights. He emphasized that men and women within the movement should have a co- operative relationship, again mobilizing the homophobic language of insecure masculinity when he argued that “men who are enslaved by their women are total f****ts”.246 The vision that the author sought to promote was one in which men and women, who retained the hegemonic characteristics of the far-right’s dichotomous gender roles, fought together in a multi-front battle against progress and liberalism. He argued that “men who work and fight with their women beside them are secure in their own mind and their race”, and that the “mutual bond” of male and female “racial warriors” was central to the advancement of the White race.247 He did not seek to disrupt gender norms, but to reframe them, framing women’s racist violence as an acceptable and

244 ‘From a Man’s Point of View’. 245 ‘From a Man’s Point of View’. 246 ‘From a Man’s Point of View’. 247 ‘From a Man’s Point of View’.

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positive expression of White femininity and men’s promotion of this violence as the ultimate expression of masculine security.

In far-right magazines written for and occasionally by women, there were rarely any calls to violent action or even suggestions of training for violence. The magazines did, however, mythologize women’s historical violent activism, relying heavily on the imagery of female pirates and frontierswomen who defended their property against violent home . In White

Sisters magazine the female pirate was a regularly deployed motif, often featured alongside terms like “hail women warriors” which glorified violent women but did not actively promote violent activism among contemporary female readers.248 In line with depictions of in popular culture the imagery was whitewashed and westernized, and in an ahistorical reinterpretation the female privateers featured in the cartoons were generally portrayed as ‘racial warriors’.249 Interestingly the image of the “female warrior” as presented in these features was directly at odds with the peaceful, maternal vision of female activism outlined in the columns of the magazines, and the idea of a sea-faring, independent and violent woman was diametrically opposed to the clearly defined domestic role of women in these pseudo-paganistic ‘Aryan’ movements. It was clear then that the cartoons were no more than a rhetorical device used to romanticize an imagined past of violent, roguish femininity, and did not suggest that women should model their activism on this vision.

Other illustrations and historical case studies did offer women a mold through which they could model their violent activism however, but again they emphasized that for women violence was a

248 ‘Hail Women Warriors’ Cartoon, White Sisters, Vol 8, No 2, c. 1985, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 249 ‘Hail Women Warriors’.

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last resort and should only be committed in defense of the home. One such illustration highlighted the case of “Mrs. Samuel Davies”, a Kentucky homemaker who reportedly

“surprised a bandit who invaded her home” in 1783.250 The illustration showed the “heroine”

Mrs. Davies holding a musket to the head of the “bandit” who was sitting at her kitchen table drinking from a liquor bottle. The imagery of the illustration, which showed Mrs. Davies in typical colonial homemaking garb, emphasized that the protagonist’s heroism came primarily from the violent defense of her domestic sphere, and suggested that the use of violent force was - like the prevailing image of women on the far-right - restricted to the kitchen.251 A later illustration in the same issue of White Aryan Resistance continued the motif, this time featuring

“Mrs. John Merrill”, a colonial-era housewife who “killed four r**skins as they came through

[her] smashed door, then finished off two more who tried to come down the chimney”.252 The description and illustration in this instance were both graphically violent, and emphasized the use of lethal force against a clearly racialized ‘enemy’ – who in this case were indigenous

Americans. Once again, the defense of the home was placed front and center, and violence was portrayed as a last resort for women whose domestic space was under attack. These illustrations made it clear that there was space in the movement for women’s violent activism, but like most prescribed female activism it was focused on and restricted to the home, and was painted as a desperate last line of defense rather than a key element of engagement with far-right politics and activism.

250 ‘A heroine of old Kentucky’ illustration, White Aryan Resistance, Vol. 12, No. 4, May 1993, pg. 7, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 251 ‘A heroine of old Kentucky’. 252 ‘Wielding an ax in 1787’ illustration, White Aryan Resistance, Vol. 12, No. 4, May 1993, pg. 11, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007.

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Practically, this created something of a dichotomy that proved difficult to reconcile for many female extremists. The entire ideology of organized, neo-Nazi racism was founded on the concept of violence, and for many this was a motivating factor which contributed to their radicalization and decision to join. However once within the group women often found themselves restricted to housework and being told that they would be able to fight for the cause once the inevitable “race war” occurred.253 Women in the movement were told that historically female racists engaged in violent action, and in the future women would be critical members of the violent fight for White victory, but that in the present violence was unacceptable and unbecoming of a woman, causing ceaseless frustration among the more ideologically enthusiastic female members. In Britain, member Isobel Hernon exemplified this frustration in an early 1990s interview with Nicholas Farrell, which Farrell tellingly entitled

‘Portrait of an Ordinary Housewife’. During the interview Hernon was portrayed as a homemaker, mother, and extremist, “peeling carrots in the kitchen” whilst articulating her ideas for a “” for “all 2,300,000 nonwhites in Britain, not to mention the Jewish population”.254 Hernon had fantasies of violent race war, in which the “sleeping lion” of the

White working class would rise up against the state and against communities of color, and the bookshelves in her “net-curtained front room” were adorned with titles such as ‘How Terrorists

Kill’ and ‘Assassination: Theory and Practice’.255 In reality, her activism was limited to choosing to shop at only White-owned businesses and boycotting the immigrant doctor who replaced her

White GP – who, ironically, emigrated to Canada.256 The schism between how Hernon envisaged her role in the racist extremist movement and the reality of life as a woman in a reactionary,

253 Farrell, ‘Portrait of an Ordinary Housewife’. 254 Farrell, ‘Portrait of an Ordinary Housewife’. 255 Farrell, ‘Portrait of an Ordinary Housewife’. 256 Farrell, ‘Portrait of an Ordinary Housewife’.

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ultra-conservative movement was deep, and Hernon’s experience and frustration was far from unique. Only the hope of future engagement with revolutionary violence drove her to stick with the movement, and her fantasies of a coming race war motivated her to play the part of the dutiful racist wife and mother, almost like a cell waiting to be activated. Other extreme- right women took their ‘defence of the home’ brief more literally, acting as violent white supremacist gatekeepers of their communities and intimidating potential neighbors who were deemed unsuitable. In 1996, in Belleview, Florida, thirty four-year-old Cindy Ann Wilson was charged with first degree arson for “setting fire to a house because the potential buyers were

Hispanic”.257 Wilson used violence as a means of maintaining a heterogeneously white neighborhood, bringing violent activism to the hyper-local level. She took the rhetoric of violence in defence of the home and family, and the racialized danger narratives around white fragility, and turned them into concrete, violent action. The frustrations and contradictions of the rhetoric around women, violence, and the home were stark, and drove many women towards either fantasies of a future race war, or random violence against neighbors.

In South Africa, however, the potential for violence was a little more immediate, and in many cases more realistic, particularly in the wake of the ‘farm murders’ panic that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s. While men tended to the farm or went to training camps, women were tasked with defending the home at any cost, and violence was expected. In a documentary produced for Dutch television in the early 1990s, female AWB members shared their stories of

257 ‘For the Record’, Klanwatch Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, No. 84, November 1996, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 2, Folder 10, Information Concerning Rightwing Extremism.

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how they were arming for potentially violent situations.258 In a modern reenactment of the stories of Mrs. Merrill and Mrs. Davies, the women spoke of how they were fully prepared to defend their homestead by any means necessary. One activist in particular spoke about how she carried a loaded .22 handgun with her when she was in the house alone, and was “not scared, but prepared” to use it. The interview was interspersed with images of other ‘boervrouws’ buying .38 revolvers and using their guns at a firing range. Meanwhile the documentary also featured clips of AWB camps for men, who were dressed in uniform and were being trained in commando- style tactics.259 Looking more like a paramilitary than a political party, the male activists were well-drilled and disciplined, and ultimately were ready for a war. The dichotomy between the

Boervrouw in her flowing traditional housedress firing her revolver and the Boer in his brownshirt uniform and red triskelion armband learning guerilla tactics ultimately demonstrated that, although there was space for both men and women to engage in violence, the gender roles remained firm and unyielding, and violent activism looked very different for men and women in the AWB. Like was the case for many American groups, women were tasked with defense of the home and family above all else, while men trained and prepared to act as a national revolutionary vanguard. The spheres and roles in which men and women operated were concrete and unmoving, and even in cases of violent activism women were restricted to the domestic.

SKINGIRLS, SUBCULTURES, AND STREET VIOLENCE

258 ‘My Beloved Country’, Holland Doc 24, 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF8jAag4Gjg, accessed June 16 2020. 259 ‘My Beloved Country’.

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While the theoretical and ideological construction of womanhood limited female activists to domestic and explicitly nonviolent roles, in practice far-right women often relished the opportunity to be involved in far-right violence. The reality of extreme-right activism was often grounded less in the utopian visions of Aryan domesticism, and more in subcultures and street violence. The extreme-right in this era found the majority of its adherents among skinheads and

Nazi punks, where gender norms tended to be less ideologically concrete. Racist skinhead gangs formed much of the ad hoc organizing model for the extreme-right during this period, and often these groups were guided more by experience and willingness to commit violence than strict ideology when assigning leadership and membership roles. Thus space was open in these circles for a broader understanding of women’s activism. The ‘skingirls’ who were involved in this scene adopted more stereotypically masculine aesthetic and assumed much more violent forms of activism. Rather than the 19050s-style ‘Tradwife’ aesthetic that many organized groups promoted, these groups promoted the “rough and ready”, boots and braces look. Skingirls adopted the same shaved-head look as the men of the movement, occasionally growing out and dyeing their bangs or the very back of their hair as a distinct marker of their allegiance to the subculture. Dick B., the father of one American skingirl named Elizabeth described his daughter’s carefully planned look, saying that she had:

“a strange hair style, cropped one quarter of an inch on top, stringy bangs in front

and on the sides of the ears, and about five inches growing from the rear, all dyed

yellow blond, the official racist coiffeur… [she] wore black pants and heavy,

hard-toed ankle high Doc Martin [sic] boots with clean white laces in a horizontal

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ladder. Her jacket had strange patches, the Confederate flag was the only one I

recognized.”260

In an edition of The Truth at Last magazine from around 1985, the editor used the lyrics of

‘Skinhead Girl’ by Symarip [covered by The Oppressed in 1984] to describe the idealized look of the street-ready skingirl. She was described as ‘my height, my weight, my size’ and ‘she wore braces and blue jeans’.261 The culture and style of the skingirl was a rebellion against the ultra- feminine beauty standards in mainstream 1970s and 80s culture, and embraced the more masculinized, gritty and violent elements of the subculture’s aesthetic. Despite the working class roots of the movement, many middle class young people were attracted to the escapism of the skinhead scene. Elizabeth – the young skingirl from San Francisco whose father lamented her involvement in racist activism – was from a wealthy, centrist, trust fund background – very much in line with Kathleen Blee’s findings on the economic background of many American skinheads.262 Despite her father’s many attempts to offer her a high quality university education, she instead found an escape from her suburban dystopia in the rough, gritty world of the skinhead scene, and soon got drawn into the more insidious, neo-Nazi world of the American

Front.263 Her style and aesthetic were a rebellion against the expectations of middle-class femininity, and racist activism offered a further release from the hegemony of liberal suburbia and all the deeply gendered expectations that it entailed. Similarly, the engagement and activism of female skinheads was almost indistinguishable from that of their male counterparts.

Elizabeth’s father noted that she “exercise[d] her right to bear arms” at rallies and

260 Unknown Author, Why, yes, Dad, I’m a skinhead, unpublished transcript, April 1991, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/32. 261 ‘Skinhead Girl’, The Truth at Last, c. 1985, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 262 Blee, Inside Organized Racism. 263 Why, yes, Dad, I’m a skinhead.

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demonstrations, and “used the American Civil Liberties Union to protect her First Amendment right of free speech in spreading her and the American Front’s doctrine of hate towards gays and minorities and all the aims of White Superiority”.264 Elizabeth – who became the secretary and women’s coordinator of the American Front - was a key organizer in the Chicago racist skinhead scene, and her gender had no impact on her ability to rise through the ranks of the organization and promote violent white supremacist rhetoric on a public stage. Elizabeth herself gained the attention of the FBI and Anti-Defamation league, and achieved notoriety and infamy for her involvement in racist rallies in California, Florida, Oregon and Idaho.265 Elizabeth’s father noted that she was not unique in the skinhead scene, and that female skinheads were an integral part of the movement. He highlighted a number of cases of extreme-violence being perpetrated by young women in the skinhead movement, particularly one case in Portland Oregon, when

Elizabeth’s former boyfriend was “bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in a sleeping bag by a thirteen or fourteen year old girl” and another in which another girl, named Casey T., “jump[ed] from Elizabeth’s car and assault[ed] a girl on a bridge”.266 Dick lamented throughout his written account and his correspondence with Elizabeth that she was on a path to committing violence or even murder herself, demonstrating that men and women had ‘equal opportunities’ for violence on the west coast skinhead scene.

Indeed, many violent skinhead groups across the United States were actually led by women, notably most often in leadership dyads with male partners, similarly to the patterns of female violent engagement highlighted by Kristy Campion.267 In a 1989 report on the skinhead scene

264 Why, yes, Dad, I’m a skinhead. 265 Why, yes, Dad, I’m a skinhead. 266 Why, yes, Dad, I’m a skinhead. 267 Campion, ‘Women in the Extreme and Radical Right’.

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and the targeting of schools by racist skinhead propagandists, the Anti-Defamation League offered an overview of skinhead group leadership across the country.268 In the report it was noted that the Confederate Hammerskins in Dallas-Fort Worth, a group comprised of between forty and sixty violent skinheads, was led by Elizabeth Jo Sherry, a nineteen year old skingirl who assumed full leadership while her boyfriend Sean Tarrant served time in prison.269 The two previously had shared joint leadership of the group, and it was assumed by the report that they would be once again sharing control upon his release. The group, under the command of Tarrant and Sherry, had a “long record of committing hate crimes” including multiple desecrations of both Jewish and Muslim houses of worship and at least forty violent hate-motivated assaults in the two years leading up to the publication of the report.270 Similarly the Birmingham Area

Skinheads - an Alabama Skinhead group also known as BASH – were led by a dyad of 19 year old Zane Hodges and his 18 year old girlfriend ‘Amy’.271 BASH, which had an estimated membership of twenty to thirty young skinheads, had been associated with a number of racist demonstrations and street battles. In Illinois in 1987, 18 year old Morgan Kipp – herself a senior member of the Chicago-based skinhead group named “Romantic Violence” – was arrested for her part in a violent assault on another female member who had planned to leave the group.

Kipp, her boyfriend Clark Martell, and her brother Sean were leaders in the organization, and seemingly engaged equally in the gang’s violent acts of intimidation.272

268 ‘Skinheads Target The Schools: An ADL Special Report’, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1989, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 4, Folder 18, Information Concerning Rightwing Extremism. 269 Skinheads Target the Schools, pg. 19. 270 Skinheads Target the Schools, pg. 19. 271 Skinheads Target the Schools, pg. 21. 272 Skinheads Target the Schools, pg. 5.

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In Britain many violent skinhead gangs were also led by female members, and it was relatively common for women of the skinhead movement to be charged with violent offences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these cases generally caught the attention of national media and made headline news. One such case was that of Norma G., an 18-year-old skingirl who led a gang of 30 young racist activists in Clerkenwell, London. The Islington Gazette reported that Norma and her gang had harassed a 17-year-old Black girl in a tube station, following her into the street and assaulting her while chanting racial epithets.273 Norma was sentenced to two months in a youth detention center, with the magistrate citing her ‘drink problem’ as a mitigating factor in the lenient sentencing. However, for the leaders of some groups in Britain – particularly those which saw themselves as the ‘respectable’ face of the extreme right – the image of skingirls getting involved in street fights and muggings was supposedly damaging to their image.274 For groups like ’s burgeoning British National Party and the almost defunct National Front, any engagement with situations likely to end in violence was prohibited for female members. The

National Front leaned towards a more absolutist understanding of women’s roles, both within their group and in society at large. In 2000, by which time the Front’s influence even on the

British far-right had dwindled almost to nil, they launched New Dawn, a splinter group and magazine specifically for women. In the launch announcement in White Nationalist Resistance magazine, ‘Michelle’ set out the expectations for members of the new group:

Obviously, there are activities that are not suitable for women to attend and are

best left to our men, such as Anti-IRA protests and some paper sales but there are

273 Author Unknown, ‘Racist Terror Gang’s Girl Leader Locked Up’, Islington Gazette, Jan 13th 1984, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 274 Copsey andWorley,‘Tomorrow Belongs to Us’.

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roles for women to play within the NF and we can make a difference. I hope to

get more and more women involved with the NF as well as getting women who

are already members, active within the women's section. Trying to balance

everything in people's life - family, job, home – is often difficult but the more

people who are involved - the less each person has to do.’275

It was clear that Michelle saw the anti-IRA protests in particular as sites of potential violence, and as such took it for granted that female members should not and would not want to engage in those activities. The language of Michelle’s advertisement suggested that the role of New Dawn would be in line with the traditional, conservative model of women’s far-right engagement rather than the street activism of skinhead groups. The post emphasized the idea of duty, packaging the duty to the group alongside duty to family, job and home, suggesting a domestic, auxiliary role to that of the men of the movement.

This emphasis on motherhood and homemaking created another stark trend in women’s violent far-right activism on both sides of the Atlantic. The female racists who were afforded the ideological leniency to commit acts of violence were often remarkably young. For underage girls who could not yet – at least legally – fulfill the role of wife and mother, involvement with street violence was one of the few tangible ways of engaging with the ideology of hate, particularly within the skinhead scene. Membership of the scene tended to trend younger anyway, largely as a result of the counter-cultural, youthful aesthetic of the movement. However, the girls involved in random acts of anti-social violence and hate crimes were even younger, sometimes bordering

275 Michelle, ‘New Dawn’ – Statement from the editor of the new NF Women’s magazine’, WNR, no. 26, 25 August 2000, pg. 2, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/003.

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on pre-pubescent. Throughout the 1990s, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch publication tracked racist violence and intimidation across the United States, charting arrests and convictions related to hate crimes. In 1996, there were two separate cases of thirteen-year-old girls being charged with serious hate crimes and violence against property. One, a girl from

Middle Island, New York, was charged with “burglary, aggravated harassment, criminal mischief and bias graffiti for allegedly spraying white supremacist slogans at residences”, meanwhile in Charlotte, North Carolina, another thirteen-year-old pleaded guilty to “burning a black church”.276 Both girls seemingly acted alone, and their violent actions were likely inspired by older members of their respective white supremacist circles. The age of the girls is shocking, but it is likely their youth that allowed them to engage in such violent acts without threatening the social order of their groups. At thirteen-years-old, both girls were too young to play the homemaker role expected of adult women, and indeed too young to be sexualized by older male members of the group. However at thirteen they were also too old to fit into the narrative – discussed in an earlier chapter – of ‘protecting’ the ‘purity’ of White children. They fit into a liminal, pre-teen space in which their femininity was not yet restricting their engagement, nor was their status as children, allowing them to engage more openly with violence without being restricted by older, male members of the group. Naturally their violent actions were exclusively against property, as they likely would have been severely injured if they engaged in violence against people, but nonetheless, these two girls were able to commit acts of white supremacist terror relatively unhindered.

276 ‘For the Record’, Klanwatch Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, No. 84, November 1996, Elinor Langer research collection on White Supremacy in America, 1956-2005, Coll 306, Box 2, Folder 10, Information Concerning Rightwing Extremism.

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CONCLUSION

The role that women played in the transatlantic extreme-right between 1969 and 2009 was not always a violent one, however to discount women’s far-right violence is dangerous. Engagement in violence was constructed almost as a privilege, and a privilege which many women in the movement did not have access to. However nevertheless, violence was central to female extremists’ understanding of their ideology and their movement, and for many was a key factor in radicalizing them towards full participation in organized racism. The pull of violent activism – particularly against ideological ‘enemies’ – drove many women towards the extreme-right, and the lack of opportunities for violence in the more conservative factions of the right drove more still into the ultraviolent skinhead scene, where street beatings and murder were commonplace.

As such, the women most likely to engage in violence were younger girls, often rebelling against their middle-class upbringings and embracing racist extremism more for its aesthetic than for the identity politics it brought with it. Younger and younger girls were brought into the racist skinhead movement and exposed to violence in their early teen years, leading many to commit horrific acts of violence that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

For the adult women of the movement, violence was often only a fantasy. They were told stories of ‘Valkyries’ and ‘Women Warriors’ who rode into battle side by side with their racial kinsmen, but instead were shoehorned into a life of domesticity and motherhood. Extremist publications featured stories of women of the frontier defending their homes to the last gasp, beating away invaders and killing all who threatened their lives and homesteads. Meanwhile the women of

Luton and Belleview were left to fantasize about the coming race war in which they could finally

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fight the battles they had been promised, and build imaginary battlefields in their own neighborhoods, turning innocent neighbors into enemy combatants. In the extreme-right milieu a woman’s place was in the home, and it was – in the eyes of the male leaders of the movement – only at home where they could actively engage in any violent activity. The expectations of engagement with violent white supremacy did not match the reality for many women, and this schism was the source of much frustration for the women of the Klan, the British Movement, and the National Front.

Nevertheless, despite the attempts of male writers and ‘intellectuals’ to proscribe women’s engagement with far-right violence, female racist extremists still found ways to engage violently with the ideology they adhered to, perpetrating acts of terror in the name of white supremacy, and have indeed been canonized by the global extreme-right in ways similar to names like Dylan

Roof, Timothy McVeigh, and Brenton Tarrant. Beate Zschäpe, the female leader of the German extremist terror cell that killed nine Turkish-Germans during the late 1990s and 2000s, has been lauded as a hero since her arrest in 2011 and her subsequent conviction in 2018.277 Similarly

Kathy Ainsworth, a Ku Klux Klan member who bombed a Mississippi synagogue in 1968 and

Shelley Shannon, an anti-abortion radical who attacked multiple family planning clinics and shot one physician in the early 1990s, have both been lionized by the extreme-right and have entered the canon of “saints” upon whom modern extremists seek to model their violence and terrorism.278 Thus, while male activists have sought to limit the extent to which women engage in far-right terrorism, the deadly impact of female extremists’ violence cannot be underestimated.

277 Michaela Köttig, ‘Gender Stereotypes Constructed by the Media: The Case of the national Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany’, in Köttig, Bitzan and Petö, Gender and Far-Right Politics in Europe, pp. 221-231. 278 ‘Saint Calendar’ Telegram Channel, t.me/SaintCalendar, accessed February 17, 2021.

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Useful Victims: Symbolic Rage and Racist Violence on the Global Extreme-Right

“I have to do it. You rape our women, and you’re taking our country. And you have to go.” – Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, 2016.279

“Facts, all of our enemies are pedophiles” – Proud Boys: Uncensored, Telegram (app), 15 November 2020

In the extreme-right context, femininity has been constructed as something mystical, precious, pure and fragile. The emphasis that activists around the world placed on the ‘lifegiving force’ of motherhood positioned white womanhood as something akin to an almost mythical energy, and created an idealized and imagined femininity that in reality belied the patriarchal and misogynistic nature of these groups. While on surface level it may seem that this gendered ideology has been largely contained within the extremist milieu and has had little impact on society more broadly, when combined with other elements of extreme-right ideology it becomes clear exactly how dangerous this ideology can be - and has been historically. The reliance of far- right ideology on racialized victimhood and a ‘siege mentality’ has positioned this imagined femininity as something under attack, and the ideas of feminine purity and the power of motherhood have been used to justify rhetorical and physical violence against people of color and minority communities. By mobilizing long-standing racist tropes of predatory black sexuality and white genocide conspiracy theories, the extreme-right have built a mythology of racialized sexual violence, in which white women and children are under constant attack by oversexualized and hyper-violent men of color. This mythology has been a constant feature of the publications and propaganda of far-right groups around the world, and has been used to

279 Ashley C. Rondini, ‘White Supremacist Danger Narratives’, Contexts, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2018) pp 60-62.

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further the constructed image of extremist racist organizations as protectors of both whiteness and womanhood. Furthermore this rhetoric has been used to radicalize communities and individuals to the point at which they see violence as acceptable and necessary – an oft-repeated process which reached its most recent tragic conclusion in 2016 when Dylann Roof murdered 9 worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, saying to one victim; “you rape our women… you have to go”.280

This chapter analyzes the ways in which extremist right-wing groups in the United Kingdom and

United States have historically constructed the threat of anti-White violence – specifically violence against white women, white elderly, and white children – and mobilized it in order to spread hate and radicalize individuals towards violent action. By examining the publications, correspondence, and propaganda of these groups and their members, I argue that the extreme- right has consistently perpetuated a mythology surrounding race and sexuality in order to justify continued rhetorical and physical violence against communities of color and the Jewish community. By using caricatured images of men of color as predatory and violent, white supremacist propagandists constructed an imagined, racialized threat against white womanhood in particular- the imagined sanctity of which was outlined in my previous chapter. By packaging this imagined threat with a conspiratorial worldview which saw the white race as facing an existential threat, far-right activists further mobilized their pronatalist and patriarchal gender ideology in order to justify hate and violence.

280 Rondini, ‘White Supremacist Danger Narratives’.

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BIRTH OF A NATION, BIRTH OF A MYTHOLOGY

It is first important to note that the idea of the ‘black male rapist’ is neither new nor necessarily the reserve of the modern extreme-right. The ideas now propagated by neo-Nazis and extremist identitarians have been an ever-present trope of even mainstream, systemic racism over the last century, and have been driven by a cultural paranoia that dates back to emancipation and beyond.

The ideology of modern extremist racism in the US, UK and South Africa builds off Jim Crow- era stereotypes and racialized products of the British and Dutch colonial imaginary which viewed black sexuality through the prisms of chattel slavery and systemic othering, constructing it as threatening and deviant. In the wake of emancipation in the United States, Tracey Owens

Patton and Julie Snyder-Yuly argue, there was an irrational cultural fear among the former slaveholding class that rape - a gendered weapon that had been systematically used as a means of oppression and assertion of white dominance – would be turned back on them by their now free former slaves.281 Spurred on by wartime narratives against emancipation and later reconstruction-era appeasement of the former slaveholding class, a cultural mania around the idea of the vengeful black rapist emerged.282 In 1915 this idea was further ingrained in the

American imaginary by D. W. Griffith’s now notorious film, The Birth of a Nation.283 In the film

- which valorized and arguably single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror in the southern United States - the ultimately fatal pursuit and attempted rape of a upper class white woman by a man of color is used to justify vigilante violence, and racist terror. Griffith

281 Tracey Owens Patton and Julie Snyder-Yuly, ‘Any Four Black Men Will Do: Rape, Race, and the Ultimate Scapegoat’, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, No. 6, July 2007, pp 859-895. 282 Jennifer Wriggins, ‘Rape, Racism, and the Law’, D. Kelly Wesiberg (ed.), Applications of Feminist Legal Theory, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. 283 D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, Epoch Producing Co., 1915.

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portrayed black sexuality as inherently predatory and as a threat to the sanctity of white womanhood, and white upper-class womanhood more specifically. The film perpetuated the narrative of sexual danger that had been propagated in the reconstruction south, bringing it front and center in the white American conscious. The approval of the film by president Woodrow

Wilson, and its status as the first ever film to have been screened at the White House, solidified its influence in American culture and helped mainstream the black rapist narrative.

The result was the emergence of a white cultural consensus surrounding black male sexuality and the threat that it presented. Black sexuality came to be seen as - in Angela Davis’ words - ‘wild, uncontrollable, bestial, and even criminal’, and the myth of the black rapist became mainstreamed in American society.284 Likewise, in the colonial world the propagation of myths about black sexuality was commonplace, and the same danger narratives around the protection of white womanhood were mobilized as a means of upholding white supremacy. In South Africa rape became a hugely politicized and racialized rhetorical weapon under apartheid. While women of color who were victims of sexual assault received little to no attention and even less state assistance, white victims whose assailants were men of color were catapulted onto front page headlines and were used to foster a ‘moral storm’ that was in turn used to justify the continuation of state-enforced segregation.285 Thus through cultural bias and racist mobilization of stereotyped sexuality the conflation of blackness and sexual predation became so

284 Angela Davis, Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism, Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, 1985. 285 Deborah Posel, ‘Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post- Apartheid South Africa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 75, No. 2 (2005), pp. 125-153.

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commonplace and culturally engrained in the postcolonial context that it led Frantz Fanon to say in the 1980s that ‘whoever says “rape” says Negro’.286

The extreme-right rhetoric surrounding rape and sexual violence is built on this same set of myths and narratives, and relies on what Joy James has termed ‘symbolic rage’- that is, performative outrage at hypothetical, imagined or even occasionally real injustices in order to justify hatred or discrimination.287 James argues that during the era of Jim Crow the rhetoric of

‘protecting women’ against a deeply racist imagining of black sexuality was used to justify ‘mob vigilantism, state malfeasance, and police violence’, and this same trend continued in post-war

America, led by extreme-right groups such as the Ku Klux Klans and neo-Nazi groups.288

Similarly pro-Apartheid paramilitary groups in South Africa and violent ultranationalist and fascist groups in the United Kingdom mobilized the language of black predation and white vulnerability to further propagate their message of hate, and to justify their physical and rhetorical violence against people of color. By constructing a rhetoric of an imagined existential threat and positioning white women as being targeted and vulnerable, extreme-right groups have sought to offer a justification for their continued violence and racism. Furthermore, this constructed threat has also served to limit the engagement and role of female members within these groups, entrenching male supremacy and patriarchal order within the extremist social schema and maintaining the ideological vision of passive femininity. Thus the rhetoric of white demographic crisis, white female vulnerability, and predatory black sexuality continue to form a tripartite mythology that underlies the very core of the sexual and racial politics of the far-right.

286 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (tr. Charles Lam Markmann), London: Press, 1986. 287 Joy James, Resisting State Violence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp 133-147. 288 James, Resisting State Violence, pg. 135.

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SEX SLAVES AND PAEDO RINGS: SYMBOLIC RAGE ON THE BRITISH

EXTREME-RIGHT

For British racist extremists, this ideological fascination with racialized sexuality and sexual danger narratives often focused on the South Asian and Caribbean populations who came to

Britain during the height of post-colonial migration following the Second World War.289 From the moment 492 Jamaican immigrants arrived in Tilbury Docks aboard the Empire Windrush, a concerted campaign of resistance through action and propaganda began on the burgeoning far- right.290 For the rightward sections of the mainstream and the extremist fringe alike, the sexuality of men of color came under the spotlight of much of this propaganda, and so began an all-out rhetorical assault on immigrant communities that continues to this day.

The National Front, perhaps the most prominent far-right group in Britain’s history, made racialized sexual danger narratives the core of their disinformation campaign for decades, combining real stories of sexual abuse and violence with fabricated stories and racialized generalizations and explanations in order to maximize the efficacy of their propaganda war. In the Young National Front’s Bulldog magazine, sensationalized, tabloid-style headlines such as

‘Sex Slaves!’ were presented alongside racist depictions of men of color and subheadings such as

‘Black Bastards’.291 The contents of these articles were nearly always jarringly racist, making sweeping statements such as ‘black Rastafarians are forcing white girls to become prostitutes’

289 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. 290 Paul, Whitewashing Britain. 291 ‘Sex Slaves!’, Bulldog, issue 35, n/d, c. 1983, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004/18.

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and using anonymous victims as their only sources. The inclusion of ‘sample’ pictures of a

‘Rasta’ and a ‘P*ki’ - in reality a British-Jamaican man and a Muslim hotel owner – further exemplified the racist narrative that the author was trying to push, and the description of the female victims as ‘tiny’ and ‘young’ further push the idea of female vulnerability and defenselessness. The use of sensational and salacious stories such as these was a deliberate tactic that sought to paint a picture of an organized and concerted assault on white womanhood by men of color.292 These stories portrayed white women as vulnerable and in need of protection from the ‘immigrants’ who were supposedly victimizing them. The fact that both Caribbean and South

Asian men were scapegoated by the paper belied the blanket racism of the organization, making it clear that the NF saw any men of color as a threat to white women and to the image of a white

Britain.

Sexual violence was mobilized in a similar way by the National Socialist Group, a violent fringe group made up of activists deemed too extreme for the National Front or later the British

Movement. The NSG connected with extremist groups around the world, and the sexual subjugation of white women by minority groups was a constant feature of their correspondence.

In one letter sent to Eastern Georgia and addressed to ‘His Serene Highness’, the author used the language of racialized violence against women to relate to his recipient, claiming that the ‘Turks desire to furnish their harems with Georgian + Circassian women’, and that the ‘women of

England’ experienced similar threats.293 The letter was sent in search of funding and support from- presumably – a minor princely ruler in the Caucasus, and the emphasis placed on the abduction and abuse of women by people of color spoke to the international appeal of this

292 ‘Sex Slaves!’ 293 ‘To His Serene Highness’, letter from K.L. Wood, National Socialist Group, SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/001.

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racialized and gendered rhetoric. The rhetorical deployment of fearmongering around non-white sexuality transcended national and regional borders, and acted as a lingua franca of the extreme- right worldwide.

In the early 1980s the case of the Bradford 12 – a group of young British Asian men who had formed the United Black Youth League in response to ongoing racist attacks and had armed themselves with petrol bombs before being arrested – reignited many of the rhetoric around race and sexuality on the far-right. Bulldog published a front-page editorial entitled ‘Self Defence is

No Offence’ in which the author claimed that white communities in Britain were ‘the victims of violent attacks by immigrant gangs’. Framing the UBYL as a violent anti-white hate group, the article claimed that pensioners in particular were becoming victims of ‘mugging and raping’ and that ‘the police are too busy dancing with the Blacks at the Notting Hill Carnival to save old white ladies from Black muggers and rapists’.294 In a side column on the same front page the author violently described the beating of a 65 year old white woman by a ‘black mugger’ in

Wolverhampton, an attack on a 73 year old lady in Brixton by ‘two black youths’, and the ambushing of an 81 year old woman, also by two ‘black youths’ in Toxteth, the scene of high profile rioting earlier that year.295 By fore-fronting and listing attacks on elderly women, seen culturally as an innocent and vulnerable group, the magazine framed the cases as part of a concerted campaign of violence against older white women, and resultantly framed the racist activism of the National Front as necessary community defense. Furthermore, by specifically centering the sexual assault of elderly women – albeit with no concrete examples or cases – the magazine sought to shock its readership and frame men of color as amoral and driven by an

294 ‘Self Defence is No Offence’, Bulldog, Issue No. 30, 1982, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004/18. 295 ‘We Must Defend Our Folk’, Bulldog, Issue No. 30, 1982, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004/18.

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uncontrolled, violent sexuality that targeted vulnerable and defenseless groups. This tactic was used consistently by Bulldog’s editors, and from as early as 1978 front page stories about the

‘savage rape of a 92 year-old woman’ were being run alongside headlines like ‘Black War Cry:

Kill White Trash’.296 The vulnerability of elderly women was being used to fuel the image of a racially divided and conflict-ridden society, and the rhetoric and cultural hegemony of protective patriarchal norms were mobilized to once again imply the justice of retributive violence. This goal was made explicit later in the same article when the author claimed that ‘all over Britain

White youths are standing up to Black arrogance and black violence. They are hitting back!’.297

Using the language of ‘race war’ the author promoted racist violence and lauded those who targeted black communities in the East End of London, demonstrating how the image of vulnerable femininity could be mobilized to radicalize and inspire further violence.

In 1983 the publication was still following the same tack, this time profiling a ‘notorious black rapist’ who was accused of ‘raping several old age pensioners’. In a graphic and shockingly savored description of the accused’s crimes the author claimed that he ‘beat up, robbed and raped several old ladies, but he also forced them to undergo other sexual abuse including buggery’. The author argued that ‘nearly all the newspapers have chosen to ignore [these] horrific crimes’, calling into question the validity of the story. However this was instead framed as proof that

‘Bulldog [was] the only paper which [told] the whole ugly truth about Black Crime in Britain’.298

Again the magazine’s editors chose to fore-front and amplify sexual crimes against elderly white women in order to justify their racist rhetoric, framing their activism as vigilante law and order

296 ‘Black War Cry: Kill White Trash’, Bulldog, Issue No. 10, 1978, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004/6. 297 ‘Black war Cry’. 298 ‘Black Rapist on Blacklist’, Bulldog, Issue No. 32, March 1983, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004/20.

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in defense of their community. Furthermore, by naming the accused and including a photograph, the magazine opened the gate to and gave their implied support for vigilante violence. In another edition of the magazine the editors make their agenda even clearer, highlighting the ‘vulnerable groups’ who were, in their view, under attack in the new Britain of ‘multi-racial terror’. The four large, red headings on the full-page spread read ‘Young Mothers’, ‘Old Ladies’, ‘Old Men’ and

‘Teenage Girls’, and were accompanied by horrific stories of sexual violence, muggings, and murder, all at the hands of men of color.299 The inclusion of only one male category in this list of

‘victims’ also illuminates the gendered thinking of the editors, who viewed personal victimhood and masculinity as incompatible. Only ‘Old Men’ were included, suggesting that they were viewed as vulnerable and possibly emasculated by younger men within the movement.300

The leading story on the page, however, focused on the ‘Young Mothers’ category, and told of a young woman who was accosted and told ‘your baby or your gold’ by ‘two black muggers’ in her apartment building. Stories like this appealed not only to the protective, racialized toxic masculinity that drove this trend in publishing, but to the fear of racial extinction and the pronatalist tendency in extreme-right circles, and as such the ‘mother under attack’ was a trope commonly deployed by extreme-right publishers and authors.301 Issue 39 of Bulldog led with a story along these same lines under the headline ‘Race Murder on Our Streets’.302 The article once again described in shocking detail an attack on a young pregnant woman, including a gratuitously violent photograph of the woman holding her blood-soaked clothes. The woman,

Jane P, was reported to have been ambushed and stabbed with a broken bottle, losing two pints

299 ‘Who are the Victims of the Multi-Racial Terror?’, Bulldog, N/D (c. 1980s), SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004. 300 ‘Who are the Victims’. 301 ‘Who are the Victims’. 302 ‘Race Murder on Our Streets’, Bulldog, Issue 39, c. 1984, p.1, SCH/01/Res/BRI/02/004/27.

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of blood and her unborn baby. This time, however, the magazine was clearer than ever in its call to arms. In more than simply a dog-whistle the article finished by saying ‘with racial violence on the increase and a police force who seem unable or unwilling to bring these animals to justice, who could blame White communities for organizing to protect themselves and each other. SELF

DEFENCE IS NO OFFENCE’.303 The story of Jane P was clearly and deliberately being used by

Bulldog and the Young National Front to radicalize and organize racist activists among their readership across the UK, mobilizing and weaponizing her perceived vulnerability and capitalizing on a horrific story that fit the pronatalist and violently patriarchal ideology of these groups.304

Perhaps the most common shock-tactic of the British extreme-right, however, was the political mobilization of pedophilia and child abuse. Much like the National Front’s concerted campaign around elder abuse and street violence, the innocence of childhood was easy fodder for the far- right’s propaganda machine. Accusations of pedophilia and child abuse were levelled at all of the ideological and racial enemies of groups across the far-right spectrum, and the publications of every group from the Third Positionists to the Neo-Nazis were filled with full page features decrying the ‘theft of innocence’ by leftists, politicians, and people of color.305 Tapping into the same racialized and gendered ideas of innocence and purity, these groups mobilized horrific imagery and stories to anger and inflame their readership, promoting retributive vigilante violence and attempting to delegitimize and destabilize existing power structures. The neo-Nazi

British Movement in particular dedicated pages to their ‘People Against Perverts’ column, and

303 ‘Race Murder on Our Streets’. 304 ‘Race Murder on Our Streets’. 305 ‘Paedophile: The Theft of Innocence Destroys Lives’, British Movement Flyer, c. 1992, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/02.

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regularly published stories accusing immigrants, Jews and politicians of engaging in child abuse rings and secret pedophilic cabals.306

The Patriotic Women’s League – an ostensibly independent organization that was in reality an auxiliary of the British Movement – made child abuse a particular focus. Their Valkyrie magazine was consistently filled with vitriolic columns decrying ‘child rapists’ and ‘child murderers’, with one particularly jarring front page featuring a graphic depiction of a lynching, accompanied by the headline: ‘Bring Back the Rope! Protect our Children From Perverts and

Child Murderers!’.307 The eight-page newsletter was filled with columns about violence against women, child abuse, ‘ritual murder’ and pornography, carefully placed alongside articles calling for the ‘repatriation of all coloured immigrants and their descendants’ and ‘rights for whites’.308

The positioning of these articles clearly racialized the issue of sexual violence, and suggested that a ‘white Britain’ would be free of the ‘monsters’ who threatened white femininity and childhood. The newsletter was adorned with images of frightened looking children alongside captions like ‘Save Me! I don’t want to live in a crime infested jungle’. The editors mobilized the innocence of childhood and using coded racist language as a means of demonizing people of color and painting minority communities as violent and criminal, and as an existential threat to whiteness.309 While not outrightly calling for vigilante violence, the newsletter did call for the restoration of the death penalty for ‘murderers, child molesters, and all the other scum that threaten our children’, later claiming that ‘families were at risk from vile perverts’ and that

306 The Rose, ‘People Against Perverts’, British Movement Women’s Division Newsletter, c. 2001, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/02. 307 ‘Bring Back the Rope!’, Valkyrie: Voice of the Patriotic Women’s League, Issue 1, N.D., SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/007. 308 ‘What we are fighting for’, Valkyrie, Issue 1. 309 ‘What we are fighting for’.

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readers should ‘keep fighting the sick system that allows this to happen’.310 The language of the newsletter was vitriolic and violent throughout, and the editors clearly sought to anger their readership by racializing and weaponizing the protection of ‘vulnerable’ women and children.

The ‘protection’ of children came in many forms for these groups, and moral outrage was consistently deployed as a political tool in the columns of their publications, most often as a vehicle for their reactionary and ultra-conservative social politics. In a column in a 1976 issue of the British Movement’s British Patriot magazine Colin Jordan decried the ‘political porn peddlers corrupt[ing] British youth’, packaging his violent homophobia alongside a screed that accused the Sexual Law Reform Society [SLRS] of seeking to legalize incest and remove the legal definition of rape from British law.311 In an eight-point ‘fact-sheet’ that mixed outright political disinformation and manipulated half-truths Jordan claimed that the Society sought ‘free access to pornography’, ‘the removal of the charge of indecent assault’ and ‘the reduction of the age of consent to 14 years’. In reality the groups stated goals were the advancement of gay rights and the relaxation of consent laws in cases where both participants were below the age of eighteen, however by including outrageous accusations of child endangerment alongside these manipulated facts, Jordan tapped into the moralistic patriarchal rage of his readership, bolstering their opposition to any reforms that the SLRS sought.312 Jordan went on to speculate about the

‘further filth and degradation’ that might follow if the SLRS’s reforms were passed, suggesting that if his readership weren’t to ‘DO something’ Britain would spiral into a situation in which

310 ‘What we are fighting for’. 311 C. Jordan, ‘Political Porn Peddlers Corrupt British Youth’, British Patriot, No. 42, Feb/March 1976, pp. 5-6, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/001. 312 Jordan, ‘Political Porn Peddlers’; David Minto, ‘Mr Grey goes to Washington: The homophile internationalism of Britain’s Homosexual Law Reform Society’, in Brian Lewis (Ed.), British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 219-243.

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‘no child [was] safe’.313 Jordan mobilized the perceived innocence of white childhood and placed children on the rhetorical frontline in order to enrage his readership and radicalize them against progressive organizations to the point that violence was a possibility. The open ended but clear call to ‘DO something’ was an obvious call to arms, but in the longstanding style of leaderless resistance and self-radicalization kept Jordan himself distanced enough from any illegal action.

Later in the same magazine another unnamed author linked the ‘moral decay’ of the SLRS and other progressive groups to a communist plot, combining the ideological pillars of conspiracy theory, anti-communism and moral outrage that are central to the social politics of the far-right.

In the tradition of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the author constructed a story of a

‘found document’ that proved that the ‘peddling of pornography’ was a communist plan to destabilize the west. Claiming that Stalin was quoted saying “if we can make one generation of any nation immoral and sexy, we can easily capture that nation”, the author argued that homosexuality, pornography, sexual promiscuity and ‘carnal mindedness’ were being deliberately pushed on the young by communists to distract them from ‘patriotism, purity and morality’.314 The author positioned progressive social politics as inherently anti-British, attempting to legitimize their regressive and reactionary stance on social issues by tying together anti-communism with their homophobia and misogyny, calling on their readers to ‘drive out the

Trojan horse of communism [in this case meaning liberalism or progressivism], or drive them underground with the rats with which they belong’.315 The veil of anti-communism has consistently been used by far-right groups to mask their true political leanings, and the rhetoric

313 Jordan, ‘Political Porn Peddlers’, pg. 5. 314 ‘And America Too!’, British Patriot, No. 42, Feb/March 1976, pg. 5, SCH/01/Res/BRI/22/01. 315 ‘And America Too!’.

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of the author in this case demonstrates the extent to which anti-communism was used as a justification for authoritarian and ultra-conservative social politics.316

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the British National Party made the issue of racialized sexual violence a core pillar of their manifesto, focusing on the case of Angela

Sinfield, a resident of Keighley whose 12 year old daughter had been abused by a group of

British-Asian men. Sinfield was avowedly opposed to the policies of the BNP, eventually successfully standing against them in a local election, however the national attention garnered by her daughter’s case was co-opted and racialized by the far-right. The BNP, led by former

National Front activist Nick Griffin, founded an action group called Mothers Against

Paedophilia, which operated under the slogan ‘the powerful maternal instincts of womanhood awaken’. Mobilizing the fascist tropes of non-white sexual deviance and a powerful, mystical white motherhood, Griffin’s party made pedophilia and ‘Asian child sex rings’ the focus of their

Islamophobic campaign until Griffin’s appearance on the BBC’s Question Time and the resultant cataclysmic decline of his party.317 This was a direct continuation of the language and imagery deployed by the British Movement and National Front during the 1970s and 80s, and belied the ideological origins of a party attempting to mainstream itself and ingratiate a more moderate electorate.

FOR MY BELOVED COUNTRY: WHITE RAGE AND ‘RIGHTEOUS VIOLENCE’ IN

SOUTH AFRICA

316 Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right. 317Trilling, Bloody Nasty People, pp. 148-149.

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In South Africa a fringe right-wing extremist group calling itself Die Brandwag -echoing the

WWII-era fascist group, Die - propagated similar stereotypes surrounding racialized sexual violence in many of their publications, specifically referencing supposed attacks on Afrikaner farmsteads by ANC militias. In a flyer published by the group in the early

1990s the author asked ‘Gaan ons toekyk hoe ons vrouens aangerand word?’, which translates to

‘are we going to stand by and watch our women being assaulted’, specifically mobilizing tropes of violence against women in order to justify retributive violence.318 The use of the possessive in this sentiment belies the misogyny that underlies it, and demonstrates the extent to which the

‘vroue’ in the extreme-right mindset is an imagined, symbolic figure that embodies the same mythologized vision of whiteness and femininity that underlies far-right ideology around the world. Similarly, groups like the Brandwag mobilized graphic language that related to violence against children, making statements like ‘Gaan ons batjies se koppe hierdie keer teen Taxi-wiele verbrysel word?’, or “will our babies’ heads continue to be smashed under taxi wheels?”, most likely relating to casualties arising from the infamous Taxi wars that began in the early 1990s and continue today.319 The flyer makes the racial element of its argument clear when it claims that ‘Swart taxi’s se onbedkoftheid is al berug’ (‘The rudeness of these black taxis is notorious’), clearly constructing the issue of violence against children as a racialized conflict. The use of children in this rhetoric again evokes images of purity and innocence, and conflates innocence with whiteness and violence against this purity with blackness.

318 ‘BRANDWAG’ (flyer), Pretoria, c. 1992, SAHA, DeWet Potgieter Collection, AL3283.B2.3. 319 ‘BRANDWAG’; Londeka Princess Ngubane, ‘From Political Wars to Taxi Wars: Investigating the transition of taxi violence in a low-income urban community in the Mpumalanga Township, South Africa’, Masters Thesis, University of Kwazulu-Natal, 2016.

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But in South Africa blackness was seen as predatory and dangerous in and of itself, and correspondence between Afrikaner nationalist segregationists and extreme-right activists elsewhere suggested that protecting women and children from contact with black South Africans was the true motive of the movement in the region, rather than preventing ‘crime’ or sexual violence as their propaganda suggested. In a letter from a South African National Socialist

Movement activist to John Tyndall, all pretense was dropped when the writer claimed that she was ‘disgust[ed] at seeing our white women and children jammed [on buses] with n*****s’.320

The author saw blackness as threatening and dangerous, while she constructed white femininity and youth as being vulnerable and easily corrupted. Even benign proximity between a black man and a white woman or child was seen as scandalous, and blackness itself was constructed as an existential threat to white ‘purity’.

In 1991, Dutch channel Holland Doc 24 produced a documentary called ‘My Beloved Country’, in which producers interviewed and followed a number of extremist Afrikaner nationalists, including AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche. The issue of ‘protecting’ women was a strong theme throughout the documentary, and the threat of sexual violence against Afrikaner women was a major focal point of the activists’ ideology, fitting well with the cultural paranoia around farm murders that was ever-present among Afrikaners during the 1990s. One unnamed female activist gave an interview in which she spoke about having a gun by her side any time her husband was not in the farmstead. She spoke of how her friend was raped on her own farm recently, spurring her to by the weapon, going on to say that she was ‘not afraid, but prepared’

320 Letter from Mrs. G. W. to John Tyndall, March 9 1966, National Socialist Movement Correspondence, SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/001.

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for ‘whatever might happen’.321 As Ivan Evans notes, farms were sites of shocking racist violence during apartheid. Black farm workers were routinely beaten and murdered by Afrikaner farm-owners, and sexual violence against Black South Africans was at epidemic levels.322 Not unlike the cultural fear of retributive physical and sexual violence in the Reconstruction US

South, it was this history of violence and oppression that fueled the cultural hysteria around sexualized and racialized revenge in the post-emancipation and post-apartheid nation. Fuel was thrown on the embers of this cultural paranoia in 2010 when Terre’Blanche was murdered by two workers on his farm in Ventersdorp, reinvigorating the discourse around retributive violence and the threat posed to White South African farmers. The violent rhetoric of Julius Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters, who regularly chant ‘shoot the Boer, shoot to kill’ at rallies has only intensified this cultural fear,

Similarly, paranoia around Black sexuality drove opposition to the integration of education. In a later scene in ‘My Beloved Country’, two Boer families talk about the perceived dangers presented by integrated schools, focusing on the ‘threat’ of sexual violence posed by black students, citing rumored cases in which 7 year old white girls ‘lock themselves in the toilet’ to avoid sexual abuse at the hands of ‘15-year-old Black boys’.323 This rhetoric echoed the anti- desegregation movement of the 1960s in the United States, and deployed familiar tropes around

‘insatiable’ Black sexuality, its inherent violence and the threat it posed to white children.

THE AMERICAN EXTREME-RIGHT’S DANGER NARRATIVES

321 ‘My Beloved Country’. 322 Ivan Evans, Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 323 ‘My Beloved Country’.

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For American activists the theme of racialized sexual violence and white female vulnerability was also ever-present. Much of the rhetoric was very similar to that of the British extreme-right, and it was ultimately the same fears around racial precarity that drove the movement’s frenzied obsession with Black sexuality. Similarly to South Africa, however, it was a nostalgia for segregation that really defined the nature of this obsession, and recent cultural experiences with an apartheid-style system that guided the separationist and segregationist ideas of the extreme- right in the United States. Whilst activists in the United Kingdom sought to put an end to immigration and begin the process of mass-, the perceived domestic threat posed by

African Americans pushed many on the extreme-right to advocate for a more violent campaign - often articulated as RAHOWA, or Racial Holy War - whose ultimate goal was the establishment a white ethnostate, very similar to the concept of a Boerestaat envisioned by extremist Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa.

This nostalgia for social segregation and the vision of a future national-segregation drove much of the rhetoric and action of extremist groups in the US, and as a result many groups focused their vitriol on contested spaces of integration. For racist campaigners who lived through the

Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the classroom was one such space, and remained a primary focus for American extreme-right publications through the latter half of the twentieth century. In the late 1960s groups like the National Socialist White People’s Party – formerly known as the

American Nazi Party – attempted to capitalize on anti-integration fears and the resentment of conservative white America towards the Brown ruling and the growing busing controversy by pushing anti-Black narratives around classroom violence and racialized sexual violence. The

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issue was - quite literally - front and center for the NSWPP, who led with a story about classroom violence in the second issue of their newsletter, the National Socialist Liberator. The story claimed that public school teachers in the Washington D.C. area were being “beaten, robbed, raped, and sodomized by their students so regularly that they’ve more or less gotten used to it”. The author made sure to clearly and unequivocally tie this issue to race, noting falsely that the public school system in Washington was made up of 95% black students. The article went on to claim that “several especially severe classroom beatings, three gang-rapes, and the recent murder of an assistant principal during a robbery by junior-high students have moved school administrators to try a technological innovation”, suggesting that all public school teachers in the

Capital region were to be issued with walkie talkies which were to be used in such cases of violence.324 The article mobilized blatant disinformation alongside Jim Crow-era stereotypes to present blackness - and particularly young, black men – as inherently violent. By falsely claiming that 95% of the school system was made up of Black students the author was able to present Washington classrooms as Black spaces, allowing the presumably partially radicalized or at least racist reader to infer that violence was endemic in all Black spaces, and therefore conclude that white spaces should be protected against this ‘threat’. The inclusion of sexual danger narratives in particular was an attempt to tap into the same fears around the protection of

White femininity against Black sexuality that British groups mobilized in the late 1970s, and spoke to the deeply sexualized nature of the anti-integration anxieties that were so common even across mainstream conservatism at this point in American history.

324 ‘Washington Teachers Require Walkie-Talkies’, The National Socialist Liberator, Issue 2, October 1969, La-RC- 1102, Box 2.

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These ideas were echoed – in even more extreme terms – by the National Socialist Liberation

Front six years later. The NSLF had been launched as a youth wing of the NSWPP in 1969, and was initially tasked with bringing the Nazi propaganda campaign to college and high school campuses across the United States. Concerned that colleges and high schools had become “focal points of activity by… racial and national enemies”, NSWPP leader and successor to George

Lincoln Rockwell Matt Koehl was determined to instead turn these spaces of education into

“potential sources of new recruits for the continued growth of the National Socialist

Movement”.325 By the mid 1970s the group had become largely independent of the floundering

NSWPP thanks to a split between Koehl and rising star of the movement .

Tommasi was seen by many – including James Mason - as a potential rival to Koehl, and after a sting operation that targeted his Los Angeles home Tomassi was expelled from the party on the grounds of having one too many ‘vices’.326

Tomassi’s NSLF, much like William Pierce’s National Alliance a few years earlier, was then given the freedom to develop its own program, independent of the traditionalist vision of Koehl’s

NSWPP. Tomassi and his group became fixated on political violence, and soon adopted its own dual approach of propaganda and terror. The NSLF was linked to a number of terrorist attacks in

California, including two bomb attacks on the Socialist Workers Party HQ and Book Store, a bay area bombing of a radar station, and another on a San Francisco TV station. They also claimed responsibility for a “tear gas incident” at a political rally in Santa Monica.327 Much like their tactics, the group’s rhetoric became increasingly extreme over the course of their existence, and

325 ‘NSLF Launched at Arlington Conference’, The National Socialist Liberator, Issue 1, May 1969, La-RC-1102, Box 2. 326 Mason, Siege, pg. 5. 327 ‘Nazis Claim Credit For Two Bombings’, Santa Monica Evening Outlook, February 7 1974, La-RC-1102, Box 2.

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the propaganda which targeted schools and colleges made no attempt to hide the virulent and violent racism that underlay their ideology. In a 1975 flyer directed at California-area high school students the group attempted to link teenagers’ natural anxieties about school to integration and, more specifically, to their classmates of color. The flyer, grotesquely titled

“Uptight about school… Or just about the n*****s?”, mobilized the same fears about Black sexuality in schools that the ANP/NSWPP had half a decade earlier, asking readers if they were

“uptight because White girls have to submit to being “felt up” in the halls by crowds of grinning

Black monkeys?”.328 The group sought to tap into the sexual anxieties of vulnerable teenage boys and radicalize them, turning those anxieties into a racist rage in a way which foreshadowed the online radicalization of young men by groups and individuals who straddle the online extreme-right and misogynist-incel movements today. Similarly, the group also sought to capitalize on the fears and anger of students who had experienced bullying, again pushing the narrative that school bullying was a racialized issue and that White students were overly victimized by students of color. Hoping to strike a nerve among even a tiny number of readers, the flyer asked: “Have you “had it” with Black animals following you home to beat you up, or pushing your head in the toilet when you go to the john, or “holding” your lunch money for you?

Are you “up to here” with Black bastards who steal your clothes, your wallets, your pocketbooks?”.329 The group deliberately and carefully latched on to what were likely the lived experiences of a small minority of students, framing these experiences as inherently racialized and reflective of broad societal ‘problems’. By mobilizing the inherent unease of youth and funneling it into directed ideological anger, the group hoped to spur readers towards violent action. This process of directed self-radicalization did not rely on broad success, rather it was

328 “Uptight about school… Or just about the N*****s?”, NSLF Flyer, c. 1975, La-RC-1102, Box 2. 329 “Uptight about school… Or just about the N*****s?”, NSLF Flyer, c. 1975, La-RC-1102, Box 2.

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more concerned with individual cases that could cause significant damage on a local level. Even one fully radicalized teen with access to firearms could cause widespread suffering within a community, as later exemplified by the steady succession of school shootings that followed the

Columbine murders in 1999.

David Duke, the erstwhile Grand Dragon of the largest Klan group in post-war America, mobilized the same message of inherently violent Blackness and the supposed threat that it presented to White children over a decade later, however unlike the NSLF he aimed his efforts at parents rather than the children themselves. In a flyer distributed across the deep South in the early 1980s, his newly formed National Association for the Advancement of White People tried to tap into anti-busing and anti-integration anxieties by tying together more moderate fears about the impact of busing on quality of education with radical claims about Black violence, arguing that “forced integration hurts educational quality and endangers white children”.330 Much like the other groups who targeted the classroom with their racist propaganda, Duke and his organization sought to frame Blackness as inherently violent, and to frame all school-based violence as inherently racialized. Duke’s propaganda war was not limited to narratives around busing, however, and his newsletters often preached a much more broadly segregationist gospel. Arguing ultimately for full social segregation, Duke made the claim that America was facing a “horrible plague of minority violence”, arguing that something had to be done to protect those “least able to defend themselves, our women and elderly”.331 Duke’s newsletters mobilized war-like language to tie violence to Blackness, claiming that “the future under nonwhite occupation”

330 Flyer, ‘Start a Revolution for White Rights’, NAAWP, c. 1980, La-RC-1102, Box 1. 331 David Duke, Memorandum, National Association for the Advancement of White People, c. 1980, La-RC-1102, Box 1.

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would bring “rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a hundred fold”, clearly portraying Blackness as a threat to the perceived virginal purity of Whiteness and to White society more broadly, in and of itself.332 Duke’s narrative tapped into the same anxieties that the BNP and National Front exploited in Britain, taking the real threat of violence against women – and the also real but arguably minimal threat of violence against children and the elderly – and racializing it by making it one of anti-White violence at the hands of an inherently violent Black population. Like the message of the NSLF, this propaganda was aimed primarily at a minority whose lived experiences or existing biases made them susceptible to such dubious claims. By radicalizing a small minority who would then be vocal – or even potentially violent – on a local level, the group would seem larger and more influential than it actually was. The mobilization of racialized narratives around danger to vulnerable populations and violence was an effective radicalizing tool, and tapped into existing anxieties that had been endemic in much of the South since the Jim

Crow era.

Perhaps the greatest purveyor of the myth of anti-White violence in the United States however, was William Luther Pierce, a self-appointed member of the global far-right intelligentsia who was highly influential in the formation and training of the NSLF. Pierce - who ultimately went on to start his own racist organization and even founded his own White Supremacist religion in the 1970s - was driven primarily by ego and his utterly racist worldview, however the impact that his ideas and concepts had on the global extreme-right cannot be understated. Writing initially under the penname ‘Andrew MacDonald’, Pierce wrote both The Turner Diaries and

Hunter, which have together formed a spiritual canon for the extreme-right and have inspired

332 David Duke, ‘NAAWP Newsletter’, 1983, NAAWP, La-RC-1102, Box 1.

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over 200 murders and a number of violent acts of terrorism from Oklahoma City to Cologne to

Christchurch.333 Pierce consistently mobilized the same tropes around Black sexuality and violence that were deployed by extremist movements in the United Kingdom and South Africa, weaving them into his fictionalized apocalyptic vision of the United States. On the second page of The Turner Diaries Pierce tapped into both these racialized and sexualized anxieties and the anxieties of the pro-gun right when he claimed that through the ‘Cohen Act’ – a clear anti-

Semitic dog whistle – the government had confiscated all guns from civilians, resulting in

‘groups of Blacks forcing their way into White homes to rob and rape, knowing that even if their victims had guns, they wouldn’t dare use them’.334 Pierce took an opportunity in the opening paragraphs of his book to lay the groundwork for his later advocacy of ‘retributive’ violence, presenting a familiar image of violent, sexually driven Black men encroaching upon ‘White spaces’ and white women. It was this same image that drove the Ku Klux Klan’s violent campaigns in the late 19th century and later in the 1920s, and Pierce indisputably knew that this trope had been an effective means of radicalizing white men towards violence over the course of the previous hundred years.

Throughout the book Pierce played on this trope time and time again, each instance described in more graphic detail than the last. Sexual violence was exclusively perpetrated by men of color and Jewish characters in the book, while violent White men were portrayed as the protectors of femininity and ultimately the White race. Pierce depicts sexual violence and rape in particular both as a symptom of liberalism and as inherent to Blackness, constructing a dystopia in which

333 J. M. Berger, ‘The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible’, ICCT Research Paper, September 2016, https://icct.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ICCT-Berger-The- Turner-Legacy-September2016-2.pdf, accessed June 10, 2020. 334 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pg. 2.

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rape laws were taken off the books because they ‘disproportionately convicted Black men’ and

‘presumed differences between the sexes’. In the reality constructed by Pierce ‘one in two

American women could expect to be raped in her lifetime’, and it was clear that by ‘American’,

Pierce meant ‘White’.335 Pierce constructed rape almost as a weapon being used in an ongoing dystopian race war between an alliance of feminists and people of color against ‘White

America’. In one shockingly racist and misogynistic excerpt Pierce wrote:

Gangs of black thugs hang around parking lots and school playgrounds and roam

the corridors of office buildings and apartment complexes, looking for any

attractive, unescorted White girl… gang rapes in classrooms have become an

especially popular sport. Some particularly liberal women may find that this

situation provides a certain amount of satisfaction for their masochism, a way of

atoning for their feelings of racial “guilt”, but for normal White women it is a

daily nightmare.336

These racialized depictions of sexual assault were used to justify violent racist retribution throughout the book, culminating in the chillingly-named ‘day of the rope’, an orgy of violence in which ‘black rapists’ and mixed-race couples were executed en-masse.337 Deliberately reminiscent of Jim Crow era , the ‘day of the rope’ functioned as a saturnalia of deadly racist violence, and Pierce clearly reveled in the details as he graphically described the ‘dangling corpses’.338 Pierce’s work was designed to radicalize its male readership towards violence, and

335 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pg. 58. 336 Pierce, The Turner Diaries. 337 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pp 162-167. 338 Pierce, The Turner Diaries, pg. 163.

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he deliberately tapped into the masculine anxieties and bloodlust of the extreme-right milieu in order to promote vigilante, lone-wolf violence against men of color. His book offered a catalogue of invented crimes against the White race, and a blueprint for mass ‘retribution’. He deliberately used sexual violence and the perceived vulnerability of white femininity to arouse anger and ultimately promote violence. Sadly this proved effective, as demonstrated by a number of high profile lynchings and acts of racist terror in the decades that followed the publication of the novel. Aside from the well-covered influence that the book had on Oklahoma City bomber

Timothy McVeigh, the book directly inspired decades of violence, beginning with the formation and activities of The Order, a far-right terror cell founded and run by former Klan leader Robert

Mathews. Mathews’ organization was modelled on a violent group of the same name that featured prominently in Pierce’s novel, and was styled as an accelerationist vanguard that would hasten the downfall of society. The real-world Order embarked on a violent two-year terror spree between 1983 and 1985, during which they “went on a rampage”, robbing numerous banks, counterfeiting millions of dollars, bombing the cars and homes of political opponents and, in perhaps their most high profile act of violence, assassinating Alan Berg, a prominent Jewish radio host.339 The deadly radicalizing impact of The Turner Diaries was tragically seen a decade later, during the violent lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, in 1998. One of Byrd’s murderers was heard shouting ‘we’re starting the Turner Diaries early’ as he dragged Byrd’s body behind his pickup truck along asphalt roads.340 Pierce, seen by many both within the extreme-right and those studying it as the foremost modern philosopher of the movement, directly inspired decades of violence through his use of sensationalist racialized sexual danger

339 Scott Klug, ‘Architect of the American Reich’, City Paper, Vol. 7, No. 20, May 15-21, 1987, La-RC-1102, Box 2. 340 Phil Miller, ‘Black Man’s Killer Said: ‘We’re Starting the Turner Diaries Early’’, the Scotsman, Feb 23 2000.

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narratives and his outright promotion of retributive action. His work is perhaps the clearest example of sexual violence being deliberately mobilized in order to galvanize and radicalize a racist extremist movement, and demonstrates the violent potential of this rhetoric, particularly when carefully and deliberately aimed at the gendered and racialized anxieties that are so endemic on the racist fringe.

A CONTINUING PROBLEM

This trend continues in extremist right-wing circles today, as highlighted by a recent exposé article on the rightwing accelerationist Feuerkrieg Divison (FkD) put together by an antifascist group in Eugene, Oregon. The article contains screenshots from FkD Telegram channels that show members claiming that African-Americans ‘molests kids’ (sic) and see ‘rape as the spoils of war’.341 The idea of pedophilic cabals also remains constant on the fringe of American politics, as was viscerally demonstrated during ‘Pizzagate’, when an armed extremist raided

Comet Pizza in Washington DC, where he believed leading Democrat politicians and celebrities were running a child sex ring.342 With the emergence of the ‘QAnon’ phenomenon after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 this concept gained a larger following, and Hillary Clinton, among others, was labelled as a pedophile by the movement.343 The language of sexual violence and violence against children is still routinely weaponized by the far-right, who use it to discredit political opponents and demonize men of color.

341 ‘Feuerkrieg Division Exposed: International Neo-Nazi Terrorist Network’, Eugene , https://eugeneantifa.noblogs.org/post/2020/02/24/feuerkrieg-division/, accessed 26 Feb 2020. 342 Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019, pp 57-78. 343 Adrienne LaFrance, ‘The Prophecies of Q: American Conspiracy Theories are Entering a Dangerous New Phase’, The Atlantic, June 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop- what-is-coming/610567/, accessed June 10, 2020.

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Likewise in the United Kingdom, the issue of ‘Muslim Child Sex Rings’ has become a major rally point and focus of propaganda for the far-right today. After a police investigation in 2014 found that over 1400 children in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been sexually abused by a group of men tied to a Mosque, far-right groups and the English

Defence League began a concerted campaign linking Islam to child sexual abuse.344 The term

‘Muslim Grooming’ entered the far-right lexicon and soon became the major focus of propaganda for the EDL’s Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in particular. Yaxley-Lennon, known by his supporters as Tommy Robinson, rose to prominence as a result of his activism on this issue, soon becoming the star of Britain’s far-right scene. Five years later Yaxley-Lennon again mobilized long-standing far-right tropes around sexual violence when he posted a picture of a leaflet published by a Buckinghamshire rape crisis center. The leaflet, which was specifically targeted at ‘black, Asian, and minority ethnic women who have experienced sexual violence’, was posted alongside a caption reading “I guess it’s ok to rape white women then??!?!?!”.345 Yaxley-

Lennon’s post mobilized the same victimhood narratives and white genocide myths that have been a cornerstone of the sexual politics of the far-right for the last 50 years, and when seen alongside the rhetoric of predatory sexuality that underpinned the Muslim grooming controversy the agenda of Britain’s modern far-right becomes clear. Most recently, in late 2019 a report published by the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism claimed that far-

344 Ewan Palmer, ‘Rotherham Child Abuse Scandal: EDL and Britain First Stage Protests Following Appalling Report’, International Business Times, 29 Aug 2014, https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rotherham-child-abuse-scandal-edl- britain-first-stage-protests-following-appalling-report-1463039, accessed 7 May 2020. 345 Stephanie Wareham, ‘Tommy Robinson Supporters Attack Wycombe Rape Charity for Advice Leaflet’, Bucks Free Press, 15 Feb 2019, https://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/17437321.tommy-robinson-supporters-attack- wycombe-rape-charity-for-advice-leaflet/, accessed 7 May 2020; ‘Rape Charity Gets Abusive Calls After Tommy Robinson Post’, BBC, 16 Feb 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-47260020, accessed 7 May 2019.

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right groups were ‘distorting truth’ around racialized sexual violence as a means of mainstreaming their Islamophobia.346 The report stated that groups routinely decried sexual violence as a symptom of migration and multiculturalism, and that marches and leafletting campaigns carrying this message and blaming minority populations had attracted support from across the social spectrum. However, in the sample area covered by the investigation, almost 85 percent of those convicted of sexual offences were white. The report found that far-right actors and organizations deliberately used the language of sexual violence to bolster their support, tapping into anxieties around vulnerability and portraying violence against women as a racialized issue.

In South Africa, fuel was thrown on the embers of Afrikaner cultural paranoia in 2010 when

Eugene Terre’Blanche was murdered by two workers on his farm in Ventersdorp, reinvigorating the discourse around retributive violence and the threat posed to White South African farmers.

The violent rhetoric of Julius Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters, who regularly chant the revolution-era song ‘Dubul’ ibhunu’ – which translates to ‘shoot the Boer’ - at rallies has only intensified this cultural fear, reinvigorating extremist separatist movements and contributing to the re-emergence of the AWB after years of insignificance and cultural invisibility.347

The imagined threat of anti-White violence – and racialized sexual violence in particular – has arguably been the core message of racist propaganda globally over the last sixty years. The

346 Commission for Countering Extremism (UK), Challenging Hateful Extremism (Report), October 2019, London, pg. 70; Lizzie Dearden, ‘Far Right poses as protectors of women to target Muslims, official extremism report finds’, Independent, October 6 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muslims-extremism-women-far- right-tommy-robinson-rape-a9143671.html, accessed May 28, 2020. 347 ‘Reaction to Malema ‘Shoot the Boer’ Ruling’, TimesLive.co.za, September 12, 2011, https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2011-09-12-reaction-to-malema-shoot-the-boer-judgement/, accessed June 15, 2020

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violent extreme-right have relied on these narratives to justify their own message of retributive racist violence, and have pursued a campaign of disinformation and symbolic rage in order to advance their vision of global race-war. By taking real victims of violence and manipulating their stories to fit an agenda of racism and violence, the extreme-right have created a set of useful victims whose pain has been capitalized upon and turned into hate.

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EPILOGUE

MAKING A MARTYR

On the morning of January 6th 2021, outgoing President Donald Trump addressed a crowd of thousands of his supporters outside the White House. “These people are not going to take it any longer. They’re not going to take it any longer”, he said, addressing his favorite foes in the media. “And we fight. We fight like hell. If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”.348 What followed was unprecedented. The crowd, made up of everyday

Trump supporters, militant QAnon adherents, American nationalists and avowed violent neo-

Nazis, made their way up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the US Capitol Building where they soon overwhelmed the lackluster – and at times seemingly ideologically sympathetic – security detail and occupied the grounds of the United States’ heart of government.349 Before long, the more enthusiastic members of the crowd had forced their way into the building itself, where the

US Senate and Vice-President Mike Pence were certifying the results of the presidential election and confirming Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. The ‘vanguard’ of wannabe revolutionaries made their way through the halls of the Capitol building towards the senate chamber, some stopping in congressional offices to take tokens and mementos of their treasonous incursion into the halls of government, some taking incriminating selfies alongside busts of former presidents. A small group, made up of hardcore QAnon radicals and militiamen

348 Associated Press, ‘Transcript of Trump’s Speech at Rally Before US Capitol Riot’, U.S. News & World Report, Jan 13th 2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-01-13/transcript-of-trumps-speech-at-rally- before-us-capitol-riot, accessed March 16, 2021. 349 ‘NSC New England’ Telegram Channel, t.me/nscne; Laura E. Adkins and Emily Burack, ‘Neo-Nazis, QAnon and Camp Aushwitz symbols on display at Capitol riots’, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, January 8th 2021, https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/neo-nazis-qanon-and-camp-auschwitz-symbols-on-display-at-capitol- riots/, accessed March 16, 2021.

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carrying flexicuffs, made their way into the recently evacuated senate chamber, with Jacob

Chansley – also known as the Q Shaman – making his way directly to the speaker’s podium in a symbolic gesture of fascist rebellion.

In the hallways the growing crowd continued to push toward the House of Representatives’

Chamber. Capitol police officers and Secret Service agents had barricaded a closed door that led into the corridor through which congresspeople were being evacuated, guns drawn on the violent crowd. Ashli Babbitt, a radicalized thirty-five-year-old Air Force veteran and ardent Trump supporter with a ‘Stop the Steal’ flag draped over her shoulders, climbed towards the smashed windows of the door, briefly breaching the barricade. A police officer fired a shot, striking

Babbitt in the neck and sending her falling backwards into the crowd. Babbitt was rushed to an ambulance after police and paramedics had been able to push their way through the rioters clogging the hallways, however she soon died.350

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Babbitt has been turned into a martyr for extreme-right groups across the country. Her death is being used widely as a rallying call by fascist, neo-Nazi and pro-Trump groups on alt-social media sites such as , and Telegram, which have all seen an influx of new users since the purge of Trumpist and QAnon-aligned accounts from traditional social media sites towards the end of 2020.351 Groups such as the Proud Boys and their more openly

350 Elisha Fieldstadt and Pete Williams, ‘No charges recommended for officer who shot Ashli Babbitt, source says’, NBC News, February 2, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no-charges-recommended-officer-who- shot-ashli-babbitt-during-capitol-n1256522, accessed March 16, 2021. 351 David Ingram, ‘A for conservatives? Parler surges amid election misinformation crackdown’, NBC News, November 10, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-conservatives-parler-surges-amid-election- misinformation-crackdown-n1247333, accessed March 16, 2021; Arjun Kharpal, ‘Signal and Telegram downloads surge after WhatsApp says it will share data with Facebook’, CNBC, January 12, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/12/signal-telegram-downloads-surge-after-update-to-whatsapp-data-policy.html, accessed March 16, 2021; Tyler Dawson, ‘Where the extreme right gathers now: Welcome to Telegram, Gab and

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fascist splinter groups have been circulating the ‘Martyr Flag’, a black flag depicting the Capitol,

Babbitt, and four stars representing the four insurrectionists killed in Wednesday’s riot. On

TheDonald - an online forum home to many of Trump’s more radical base – a painting of

Babbitt’s death reminiscent of the great American war paintings entitled ‘Daughter of Liberty’ has garnered significant attention, attracting ominous comments such as “someone needs to pay for this poor woman’s death” and “let’s turn this against them”.352 Perhaps most concerningly, the membership levels of many of these online groups and forums has been rising exponentially in the wake of the January 6th riot and the mass deplatforming from mainstream social media sites which followed. The Western Chauvinist telegram channel – a channel formerly known as

ProudBoys: Uncensored which regularly calls for violence and uses Turner Diaries-inspired language such as ‘the Day of the Rope’ to do so – saw its membership double from 12,000 to

28,000 between November 2020 and January 2021, and as of March 2021 stands at over 45,000 subscribers. The channel is acting as a gateway to the most extreme, neo-Nazi corners of alternate social media, and is now using the death of Ashli Babbitt to radicalize and mobilize its new membership.353

Her status as a white woman and a ‘patriot’ who was – in the eyes of the fascist right – unjustly killed by overzealous law enforcement in defense of an illegitimate state naturally drew comparisons with Vicki Weaver, an antigovernment extremist killed during the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho in August, 1992. Weaver’s husband, former Green Beret and ardent separatist

other shadowy online platforms’, National Post, January 20, 2021, https://nationalpost.com/news/where-the- extreme-right-gathers-now-welcome-to-telegram-gab-and-other-shadowy-online-platforms, accessed March 16, 2021; ‘The Western Chauvinist’ Telegram Channel, t.me/TheWesternChauvinist. 352 TheDonald.win, accessed January 7, 2021. 353 ‘The Western Chauvinist’.

178

Randy, was caught up in a sting operation when he procured an illegally modified shotgun for an undercover ATF agent. After failing to show up for his court date, the United States Marshalls

Service was deployed to bring him in. The Weavers, however, were heavily armed and were not willing to go quietly. When an USMS agent shot the family dog – who he believed was going to give their position away – the Weavers and their family friend Kevin Harris opened fire on the agents, leading to an initial gunfight in which fourteen-year-old Sammy Weaver and Deputy

Marshall Bill Degan were both shot and killed. Vicki was killed a day later, when Lon Horiuchi

– an FBI Rescue Team sniper – fired two shots at Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris respectively. The second shot glanced off Harris, going through the front door of the Weavers’

Idaho cabin and fatally striking Vicki.

Like Babbitt, Weaver quickly became a martyr for both the anti-government and white supremacist right. Her perceived status as an innocent, white, female victim of ‘state aggression’ instantly placed her on a pedestal, and was used to justify tax protests, demonstrations and even violent action by far-right groups in the years that followed. Her name became a rallying call of militias, the , Klan groups and neo-Nazis across America, and she became a symbol of a violent, anti-white, anti-democratic government that would kill even an innocent woman in their campaign to crush dissent and confiscate firearms from the right-wing man.

Vicki Weaver’s death unified the far-right in America, and began a process of collective radicalization that would culminate in the worst act of domestic terrorism in United States history. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicholls, co-conspirators in the 1995 bombing of the

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, cited the events at Ruby Ridge as the first

179

in a line of key events that radicalized them and convinced them that catastrophic violence against the state was the only viable solution.354

McVeigh’s radicalization – and the role that Vicki Weaver’s death played in it – should stand as a warning for researchers, activists, and policy makers dealing with the far-right. The symbolic death of white women is used by the far-right to promote and justify their most heinous and devastating acts of violence. The narratives of white feminine ‘purity’ and a violent, oppressive society hell bent on destroying it has been consistently mobilized by propagandists, recruiters and leaders to radicalize men towards violence, tapping into the deep-seated hero complex that undergirds far-right masculinities. The framing of women like Weaver and Babbitt as innocent martyrs for a greater cause are used to push men towards becoming more violent, active martyrs themselves, making the ultimate sacrifice in order to protect white femininity and by extension the white race.

As the dust of January 6th continues to settle, we need to be acutely aware of the narratives being pushed by far-right groups both online and in-person, and the self-radicalization processes that are being carefully guided and mentored so as to encourage and facilitate ‘lone wolf’ violence.

Gender has always played a central role in far-right organization, radicalization, mobilization, and violence. Only by understanding the ways in which gender, masculinity and femininity are used within the far-right sphere today can we begin to challenge this hateful ideology which has

354 Allison Reese, From Ruby Ridge to Oklahoma City: The Radicalization of Timothy McVeigh, Unpublished Honor’s Thesis, 2018, University of South Carolina Libraries; Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: From Bacon’s Rebellion to the Oklahoma City Bombing, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

180

cost so many lives over the last century. Hate is intersectional, our response to it needs to be intersectional too.

181

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