Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

[American Dream]

I like Rhyd Wildermuth's critique of privilege politics and its relation to alt right trends:

Reacting to Reactions to Reactions: a review of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies

So to note that the tactics employed by social justice activists and by the alt-right are the same then begs a more important question: how did they both become so common?

Nagle’s book answers this very well by presenting a cultural history of online communities, tracing the growth of ideas and narratives through both 4chan and its social justice (and let’s not forget–porn) twin, Tumblr. Particularly of note for her is the explosion of new gender identities birthed in the alembic of Tumblr’s virtue-market, paralleling 4chan and the ‘manosphere’s’ obsession with misogyny.

While gender non-conformism is nothing new, and has certainly been ever more mainstream since the beginning of the sexual revolution and the gay liberation movement, this is part of the creation of an online quasi-political culture that has had a huge and unexpected level of influence. Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as.

You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.

As she points out, not conforming to the gender binary is hardly a new thing. What is new is how we talk about gender variations, how we argue about them, and what sort of recognition they require. While sites like Tumblr (founded only ten years ago) are not the only place people have discussed new ideas about gender, there is an extra capitalist mechanism at play which mediates those discussions.

That mechanism? Attention, distributed through the accumulation and appropriation of virtue.

At the beginning of the last decade, if I wanted to express my gender in a way that did not fit in with the dominant modes in my community, the amount of work I would have to do in order to convince people would be quite extensive. I might have personal friends who were supportive, might even be able to meet people who felt in similar ways, but merely saying that I was an “ambigender Otherkin” wouldn’t really get me far. Through Tumblr we are now able to find hundreds of people around the world who feel exactly the same way, or read our account and ‘discover’ that they, too, are also an Otherkin ambigender.

Upon discovery of kindred Otherkin ambigenders, a sense of community is created around which each person with similar experiences can share their joy and sorrow and especially their struggles against a world that doesn’t embrace, understand, or (likely most painful of all) has never heard about Otherkin ambigenders (!!!). From such communities can then arise political narratives which explain the oppression that one might experience when others refuse to acknowledge your identity.

Demands for better recognition, for protection, and collective actions against those who erase or dismiss your existence are now much easier to organise through such mediums, so much so that Tumblr can be said to have significantly contributed to the liberation of ambigender Otherkin.

Whether you as a reader find such discussions a bit ridiculous or truly liberatory, a more important question arises. How, then, do we judge the oppression of peoples? What moral frameworks should we use to prioritize in whom we will invest our limited political attention and energies? Is the struggle for disability recognition, the protection of women’s access to contraception and abortion, liberating Black men from the prisons, and bathroom access for trans people all equal to the needs of the Otherkin ambigender community? And can an intersectional social justice framework hashed out through social media by means of listicles on Everyday Feminism and Teen Vogue really help us answer that question?

Rather than answering that question in any meaningful way, Tumblr-Liberalism (Nagle’s description, and apt one) has provided us instead with a playbook to get attention for our cause, to get our concerns heard. To do so, we must accumulate virtue through a highly-ritualized social process invoking the demonic spirits of ‘shame’ and ‘privilege’ to coerce others into action on behalf of each individual cause. And when virtue is too equally distributed and its ‘buying power’ lessened by inflation, we must then appropriate the virtue of others by showing them no longer worthy of it (the social justice ‘call out’).

This playbook works because very few of us want to appear like assholes, and invoking virtue is a way to make others feel like they have wronged someone and should make amends. So if while reading my explanation of the oppressions faced by Otherkin you smirked or rolled your eyes, you just engaged in Otherkin-shaming. You showed your privilege as someone who is not Otherkin. And no–it’s not up to ambigender Otherkin to educate you on their oppression. And because you likely do not want to be a bad person, or at least do not want to appear as a bad person, such accusations may shame you into being more willing to listen to the concerns of ambigender Otherkin, help them raise awareness, ‘call-in’ your friends whose actions are obviously antagonistic micro-aggressions against ambigender Otherkin, etc..

Nagle asserts that virtue is the core capital of social media interactions. I want to appear virtuous, to appear as if I care about people (because I do). So I express things which show my virtue on the internet, and that grants me virtue capital. But when I do something un-virtuous, I can lose that very quickly as others seize the opportunity to accumulate the virtue I have forfeited by saying something ‘oppressive’ on-line. And even if I have not said something oppressive, it can be enough for virtue competitors to convince others that I have by changing the rules on what is oppressive or not, redefining oppression in a way that benefits the virtue competitor.

Rejecting the cumbersome and solipsistic nature of these closed systems of virtue has given great strength to the alt-right. The popularity of charismatic figures like Milo Yiannopoulos derives precisely from his boldly-stated rejections of the economies of virtue. But what the alt-right (especially 4chan denizens) do to political enemies (particularly women) operates on the very same mechanism. Women have had to flee their homes and people have actually killed themselves because of the social media campaigns against them, but whereas with Tumblr-liberalism the stakes are your social status, with the alt-right it is that and also your physical safety.

Shame is the core weapon in both political tendencies, the goal in both cases to ‘ruin’ the transgressor, and though the consequences of such ruin are different, the processes are so similar that we cannot help but wonder why they got that way.

https://godsandradicals.org/2017/11/10/ ... l-normies/

[American Dream]

Beyond revanchism? Gentrification, prisons and anti-colonial revenge



The following is an edited excerpt from Max Haiven’s Towards a Materialst Theory of Revenge: The Lives of Witches, published in August 2017 by the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL)’s VAGABONDS series of peer-reviewed working papers. For more info, visit rival.lakeheadu.ca/vagabonds.

Fanon of the Whites?

For this reason, right-wing (though anti-Trump) New York Times commentator David Brooks might well have accidentally stumbled onto something worthwhile when he posited in a recent column that “Steve Bannon is the Franz Fanon of the Whites.” Such a statement goes well beyond Brooks’ lacklustre intent, which is to trod the well-worn ground of castigating campus intersectionalist privilege politics and bemoan a culture of exploitative victimhood. Offering Bannon as the Fanon of Whites might suggest that he is their theorist of revenge. Or, more accurately, Bannon wishes to be the Fanon of whiteness.

Fanon, famously, provided a philosophical, moral and political rationale for anti-colonial revolt, and for violence as a means to achieve national liberation. This is all within a context, of course, where colonial regimes’ claims to legitimacy were often based on their “benevolent” gift of the so-called “rule of law” to Indigenous and colonized populations, which allegedly replaced what colonists imagined and instructed was a prehistory of endless, limitless vengeance. Not only did such an assumption erase the complex legal, juridical and diplomatic structures that predated their arrival, it also disguised and normalized the inherent, structural and extremely brutal vengefulness and impunity of individual colonists and colonial systems as a whole.

These colonial notions still operate, even in allegedly post-colonial times, in, for instance, the way the mythscape of endless, limitless, atavistic vengeance is woven around the image of the racialized gang in the (highly profitable) American media. Another example is the fantasy of the “failed state,” where, in absence of Western institutions, racialized populations regress into an economy of limitless and self-perpetuating vengeance. Such myths serve to disguise and normalize the inherent, structural and extremely brutal vengefulness of the police or neo-colonial systems as a whole. In a sense, colonialism was and is always-already the revenge of whiteness for a crime or infraction never committed but endlessly fantasized about. In this sense, Bannon has almost nothing to do with Fanon and far more in common with a long and bloody tradition of the powerful wreaking a terrible, warrantless vengeance on the oppressed, which I explore in greater detail elsewhere.

Fanon, for reasons similar to Marx and Engels, is distrustful of revenge. He offers the following: “Racialism and hatred and resentment — a ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ — cannot sustain a war of liberation… hatred alone cannot draw up a program.” Revenge here is legitimate, but not strategic — it is not morally wrong but rather insufficient to generate a sustainable movement of liberation. For Fanon, revenge is generally presented as a base, reactionary emotion that motivates understandable but ultimately unstrategic actions. For instance, he speaks about the almost spiritual dimension of public anti-colonial violence, or about the sense of revenge germane to sexual fantasies of race. But these alone cannot sustain a movement, and indeed imperil it.

On another level, Fanon’s whole oeuvre is a theory of revenge in the more systemic and structural fashion at which I have been aiming. Just as Marx wrote Capital to put a weapon of righteous, patient and slow vengeance in the hands of proletarians, so too is Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth a guide to how to take revenge on a system of colonialism that has been built around racist, colonial revanchism and, as such, built to withstand and indeed incorporate small and petty individual acts of revenge.

Glen Coulthard, for one, has revisited both Fanon and Marx for clues as to how to think about Indigenous resistance and resurgence in North America in a moment when, on the one hand, settler colonies like Canada, the US and Australia encourage a politics of reconciliation and, on the other, the conditions of genocidal colonial usurpation persist for Indigenous people, in deadly forms. For Coulthard, like many anti-colonial thinkers before him, Fanon holds the seeds for a refusal of recognition, the power to collectively reject inclusion within a system of slow death and subjugation. At stake for Coulthard is not simply a revenge fantasy but a broader notion of revenge that is also an autonomous Indigenous resurgence.

Here we may be coming closer to a notion of vengeance worthy of our dreams, one that would surpass the castigation of revenge as a brutish, reactionary emotion that we inherit from Francis Bacon and a long line of ruling-class, white philosophers, whose secret work, we have seen, has been to hide the logic of vengeance at the very heart of the system that has privileged them.

The more radical, generative and strategic revenge I have in mind, along with Marx and Engels, Fanon and Coulthard — a truly structural theory of revenge — might be tritely summed up in the graffitio appearing on many walls in Southern Europe since the 2010 dawn of the Eurozone debt crisis and punishing austerity regimes: “Living well is our best revenge.” Or, if you prefer, Ireland’s Bobbi Sands, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

But let me hasten to distinguish this from mere sentimentalism: to me, these phrases imply much more than a sort of solipsistic retreat into a politics of personal contentedness, where one turns the other cheek to the vengeance of capitalism or colonialism or white supremacy. Rather, it means three things: militant collective refusal, seizing the means of social production and the radical imagination.

More at: https://abolitionjournal.org/beyond-rev ... l-revenge/

[American Dream]

Andrew Auernheimer Praises Anders Breivik And Timothy McVeigh As ‘Perfect Heroes’




In the first episode of his new podcast, Race Ghost: Roast to Roast, Neo-Nazi hacker Andrew “weev” Auernheimer praised mass murderers Anders Breivik and Timothy McVeigh as “heroes” and “patriots.”

CONTINUE READING

[American Dream]

Ending the White Race

Whiteness isn’t actually a tribal or cultural form (no one was “white” in Europe 500 years ago) and thus there is no such thing as ‘white ancestry.’ Caucasian isn’t a tribal or cultural term either–it was invented by a race theorist at the end of the 18th century.

Whiteness is a very recent idea, and comes from the complete erasure of ancestral and cultural histories. To be ‘white’ is to no longer have a cultural history; in order to become fully white, European immigrants (especially from places still not fully considered white in Europe, like Ireland, Poland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) needed to forsake their specific cultural and ethnic backgrounds. By doing so, they gained access to white skin-privilege in the United States and Canada and became assimilated into ‘whiteness.’ All their history, their beliefs, traditions, modes of dress and food and their languages were bleached out of them, but in return they gained a new settler-colonial identity which granted them a little more access to wealth and security.

We need to go a little farther here, though, because there is actually no such thing as ‘ancestrally-French’ or ‘ancestrally-German.’ Neither of those places actually existed three hundred years ago. Instead, one might have been ancestrally-Breton or ancestrally-Bavarian. Go back a little further and those ancestral connections existed on the level of village or countryside, not ethnic people-groups.

Even more fascinating, however, is that there were no pure or pristine cultures back then, either.

People moved, and moved a lot. They traded, they inter-married, their cultural and religious forms becoming mixed in precisely the way that terrifies both social justice activists and white nationalists. Vikings “culturally appropriated” by making clothing with Islamic verse on them. Celts “culturally appropriated” Egyptian and Greek deities in what is now London, 2000 years ago. Sephardic Jews and Moorish Muslims and Iberian pagans mixed their cultures and languages fluidly in Al Andalus. Semitic Phoenicians traded as far up to Cornwall, littering the Atlantic coasts of Europe with their artifacts.

Cultural exchange is not only an ancient thing, but it is unavoidable. When peoples come into contact with each other, they trade, they talk, they borrow, they teach and mimic each other. Likewise, racial purity is impossible–people have an odd tendency to want to sleep with each other, regardless of where they’re from.

That both social justice activists and white nationalists have trouble understanding this comes from the very same mechanism by which social justice activists saw red boot laces on an advertisement and screamed ‘racism.’ Both are certain that ‘whiteness’ means something, and both insist that whites cannot be anything else but what they’ve decided they are.

To get out of this mess isn’t easy, but it’s possible.

First, we must release our death grip on symbols and meaning, and especially our white-knuckled grasp on ‘whiteness.’ To do so, we’ll need to look at our past with a different perspective, rejecting the fundamentalist narratives of both white nationalism and ‘woke’ nationalism.

Because though whites have lost their ancestral connection, European spiritual and cultural forms didn’t just disappear because Americans forgot them. Here where I now live in Bretagne, spiritual and magical traditions still exist–there’s no need for anyone here to hire a plastic shaman or join an online witch course to learn about Ankou, the Korrigan, or any of the other spirits and gods of their land–they can just ask their grandparents. The same is true in many parts of Europe, especially in non-urban areas.

Reconnecting to cultural and ancestral traditions will require giving up something, though. Because whiteness is not just built upon the erasure of ethnic and cultural history, but also upon the lie that whites are enlightened, progressive, and ‘modern’ while all the rest of the world (now and in the past) was primitive, unenlightened, superstitious, and stupid.

Here, again, liberal social justice ideas actually get in the way of dismantling whiteness by painting the current regime of rights and technology as more enlightened than anything that existed before. Whiteness itself is founded upon this idea, the certainty that we know the true meaning of things. That the order of the world that came about with whiteness is the best one, that all other ways of being are wrong. In this way, even people who are not white but who hold on to this lie are making sure whiteness never ends.

And finally, we must talk about cultural appropriation in a way that actually fights those who are turning what belongs to everyone into property. The pharmaceutical companies and petty capitalists that patent ancient medicines, the universities that steal indigenous artifacts for ‘research,’ the media conglomerates who sell us fictive versions of our own history, all the plastic shamans and spiritual teachers who sell us knowledge that was once free, and anyone who would try to police our cultural, spiritual, and social expressions, be they white nationalists or ‘woke’ nationalists–they are the ones stealing meaning from the world.

-White Purity and ‘Woke’ Nationalism

[Wombaticus Rex]

I like how this thread has been getting more and more explicit about both extermination of "Whiteness," as well as their total inability to parse "Whiteness" from "Patriarchy" from "Capital." That last one being the big winner, in our current Culture Wars crossover event.

A very edifying thread that continues to pay dividends.

[Karmamatterz]

Yes, and it's quite rewarding to see this thread along with all the endless alt-right threads that point out the racism of the white nationalists. It's comforting to know those who want to abolish the white race do after all have something in common with the alt-righties.

[American Dream]

From eugenics to voter ID laws: Thomas Farr's connections to the Pioneer Fund


The Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 by Wickliffe Preston Draper, a reclusive heir to a textile fortune. The Pioneer Fund’s first president Harry S. Laughlin was the most prominent American eugenicist of his era. One of Draper’s early investments was in the work of white supremacist Earnest Sevier Cox, who helped draft an amendment to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act that outlawed interracial marriage. Cox wrote that he was seeking to prevent “near-white negroids” from being able to “marry into the white race.”

William H. Tucker described the Pioneer Fund’s legacy in his definitive 2002 history of the hate group:

Despite attempts to sanitize Pioneer’s image, it is undeniable that the fund was established to use science to pursue the goals of its founder: the preservation of white supremacy and white racial purity from the threat posed by blacks and undesirable immigrants, especially Jews…

For decades, the Pioneer Fund did this by supporting like-minded scholars; publishing or republishing racist tracts and research and sending them to opinion leaders, institutions of higher learning, and elected officials; and bankrolling lobbying efforts against civil rights legislation and affirmative action policies.

Aside from Draper, the most important figure at the Pioneer Fund was Harry Frederick Weyher, Jr., who first became friends with Ellis when they were both undergraduates at the University of North Carolina.

“[A]ll the segregationists’ projects intersected on Harry Weyher’s desk,” wrote Tucker, and Weyher decided which projects received funding. After Draper’s death in 1972, Weyher ran the Pioneer Fund until his own death in 2002, as Tucker summarized:

Weyher would make Draper’s cause his own, heading the Pioneer Fund through the rest of the [20th] century, disbursing his mentor’s acknowledged and unacknowledged donations to the campaign against equality for blacks, organizing many of these efforts, monitoring their results, and becoming the heir not just to much of the Colonel’s fortune but also to his social policy agenda. If Pioneer was originally “Draper’s Fund,” it was to become Weyher’s.

One example of Ellis and Weyher collaborating occurred in the 1950s. According to Tucker, Ellis likely sent Weyher the work of University of North Carolina professor Wesley Critz George, including a pamphlet titled “The Race Problem from the Standpoint of One Who Is Concerned with the Evils of Miscegenation.” In it, George decried the “protoplasmic mixing of the races” which would “destroy our race and civilization” because African Americans were “genetically unacceptable.” Weyher would fund George on the basis of this recommendation.

Around the same time, Ellis echoed George in his role opposing integration as special counsel to the Pearsall Committee, set up by the North Carolina governor to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. “[T]he present integration movement in the public schools is but a part of a planned social revolution in the South, fostered, directed and financed by non-southern whites...[whose] eventual goal…is racial intermarriage and the disappearance of the Negro race by fusing into the white,” Ellis said.

Ellis and Weyher were both deeply involved in the fight against integration throughout the 1960s. The Pioneer Fund dumped millions into the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which The New Republic called “the largest state-level spying effort in U.S. history,” while Ellis in North Carolina considered legislation that would eliminate the tax-exempt status of black churches in order to target the spaces where the NAACP met to strategize integration efforts.

Pioneer Fund grantees were just as hostile to the idea of extending voting rights to African Americans as they were to the desegregation of public schools and interracial marriage. For instance, one major grantee, Carelton Putnam, wrote in 1967 that “the unlimited suffrage concept is marginal [even for] an advanced and experienced race like the Anglo-American [but] to apply it to states or communities with high percentages of a retarded race is suicidal.”

More at: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... oneer-fund

[American Dream]

Is Congressional Candidate Paul Nehlen A White Nationalist?



Although Nehlen has not, to my knowledge, publicly declared himself a supporter of white nationalists or the alt-right, his actions paint a portrait of a man who shares their values.

For example, late last year Nehlen made a guest appearance on the white power podcast Fash The Nation, where he championed the repeal of birthright citizenship, denounced the Muslim faith, and spread a bizarre rumor that Chinese women are travelling to the U.S. en masse to give birth. Hosted by the pseudonymous Jazzhands McFeels and Marcus Halberstram, FTN is a font of racism, anti-Semitism, and deranged conspiracy theories.

McFeels has appeared on David Duke’s personal radio show where he explained how the alt-right uses of the triple parentheses, or “echoes,” to target Jews online. He’s claimed that white people are necessary for an orderly society, and that the ultimate goal of the alt-right is a “white ethnostate.” And he speculated that the shooting in Las Vegas which left 58 dead might have been carried out by an anti-white “Leftoid.”

https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/12/07/is ... more-45000

[American Dream]

Tim Murdock: Thanksgiving Is A ‘Celebration Of Whiteness In Its Raw And Primal Form’




Allsup, who previously made a video titled “Why Leftists Hate Thanksgiving,” explained to the rest of the panel that Thanksgiving is more than an “excuse to get together with family” and “have a Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Really Thanksgiving is a celebration of the fact that Europeans were able to come to this continent and, within a few hundred short years, take control of the entire continent and build one of the greatest civilizations of all-time, that the world has ever seen,” he said.

“And that those Europeans were able to rebel against the strongest empire at the time, of course, the United Kingdom — or Great Britain at the time — and create this independent, new country that has done some very great things.”

Actually, James, I’m pretty sure we celebrate that last part on Independence Day. But point taken that Thanksgiving is, in the words of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “designed to reinforce a sense of collective patriotic pride.”

But instead of an “organic friendship” between Native Americans and Pligrims, the first Thanksgiving was really an outgrowth of “political alliances built on a mutual need for survival and an Indigenous struggle for power in the vacuum left by a destructive century of foreign settlement.”

Allsup further alleged that “a lot of the Leftists’ hate for Thanksgiving is based on their hatred for white people in general” which, he said, is the reason for the “glamorization of the noble savage of the Native Americans.”

Allsup rejected this “noble savage” myth in favor of a different one: the myth that all Native Americans were savage and warlike. As he put it, “in reality these Native Americans were just eating each other and killing each other en masse.”

https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/12/08/ti ... more-44992

[liminalOyster]

The extended Max Haiven material is good thought fodder. I like it.

"Revenge is the structural condition of the hot peace of capitalist accumulation." from Vagabond 001: Towards a Materialist Theory of Revenge

[American Dream]

Thanks- great stuff. Max Haven is important.

The radical imagination takes us from sympathy to solidarity.

The radical imagination forces us to reimagine our relationship with those who suffer and to imagine the ways our own suffering or fortune is tied to the suffering or fortune of others. For instance, the radical imagination insists that we pay attention to how, based on the bodies we inhabit, we are privileged or oppressed, empowered or disempowered, valued or devalued. Moreover, it allows us to link an analysis of inequality, oppression and injustice to broader systems of exploitation and oppression like capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, heretonormativity and white supremacy.

We are all alienated under capitalism - alienated from the sort of work that might be meaningful, the sort of relationships that might sustain us, from the earth and from community. We are alienated from our own bodies and our own true selves. But we are not all alienated equally, or with the same consequences, and we are certainly not all equally exploited and oppressed. The radical imagination allows us to see this alienation, exploitation and oppression, and what is common and uncommon about it. It enables us to see that none of us are free until we all are. But the radical imagination is a process, not a possession, a collective journey, not a personal destination.

Lessons From Social Movements: Six Notes on the Radical Imagination, by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish

[American Dream]

Origins of the alt-right, Part 2: White supremacy is deeply enmeshed in our culture

The alt-right — as was true of Hitler and his movement, or lately the extreme right in Russia — is traditionally fond of the occult; the occult gives the leader the power to cleanse the body politic of the pests, the rats, the unclean ones who disrupt the imagination of purity that the elect are forever seeking to consolidate.

The alt-right has a tremendous fear of the “globalists” in control of all the data they need to manipulate every aspect of the white race’s existence, down to their most trivial consumer choices: Think of it as the Mark of the Beast manifesting in the supercomputer or the dream of artificial intelligence, which to the alt-right, beholden to old-fashioned patriarchy in their self-presentation, is the ultimate nightmare. Scientific capitalism, of the highly technocratic variety, becomes for the alt-right an occult force it must contend with, comprehend for the benefit of its followers and ultimately defeat.

The only form of occult power the alt-right can see itself in possession of, to defeat this other (globalist) occult force, is the image and power of the white race itself. Whiteness is its own occultism, in fact the highest form of occultism. Of course, the liberals fighting this occult whiteness — think of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ recent misguided article in the Atlantic — are the greatest builders of this white occultism, ascribing to it magical powers that even the alt-right might be ashamed to claim for it.

In an earlier time, in the 1930s, with the American Silver Shirts or the German American Bund, with Hitler’s example to serve as inspiration, the occult was not so easy to grasp. It has taken 80 years of conspiracist thinking, emanating from all parts of American popular culture, to dissolve the distinction between history and fantasy, truth and reality. Thus we have the millennial (and millennialist) mindset at last come to fruition in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, which explains to me why the alt-right is the perfect vehicle for this end-time vision that so suits our psyches.

More at: https://www.salon.com/2017/12/10/origin ... r-culture/

[American Dream]

REFUSING THE FASCIST FUTURE: AN INTERVIEW WITH SHANE BURLEY

DECEMBER 16, 2017

Below is an interview with Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It author Shane Burley discussing the Alt Right, anti-fascism, and what a mass movement looks like.

So where did the Alt Right come from?

The Alt Right really comes from a few converging political movements, both inside and outside the U.S. The real beginnings of this goes back to France in the 1960s when a number of far-right intellectuals laid the groundwork to “rebrand” fascist ideas using the language of the left. The European New Right, led by figures like Alain de Benoist and Guillume Faye, used the language of the New Left, appropriated the arguments of post-colonialist and national liberation movements, and attempted to engage in a type of “cultural struggle” as proposed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Their ideas really were to pick up where the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Radical Traditionalist thinkers like Julius Evola left off and argue for a going after the culture with nationalist values. If they change the way that Europeans think about the world, and think about themselves, maybe this can allow a radical shift in politics down the line.

They argued that they were “anti-colonialist” and that white European nations had been “colonized” by forced of “globalist” capitalism and modernity. Their argument was then for “Ethnopluralism,” a sort of “nationalism for all peoples,” that could then fight the destructive elements of modern multiculturalism, internationalism, and capitalism. This approach avoided racial slurs, violent white nationalist politics, and the baggage of fascist political parties, and really laid a heavy intellectual groundwork for a new generation of fascists who wanted to appear as academics rather than Klansman.

The next is really paleoconservatism, a sort of far-right American conservatism that defined itself in opposition to the hawkish foreign policy of the neoconservatives that were coming into power inside the GOP in the 1980s. They saw themselves as a part of the “Old Right,” which was likely a fantasy rather than a reality, which was isolationist, traditional, and America First. The paleocons were aggressively conservative on social issues, especially in reaction to queer rights and the AIDs crisis of the 1980s, and were reactionary on racial issues. Pat Buchanan was the best known of these figures, though he was moderate by their standards.

The third real key element to the Alt Right is old fashioned white nationalism. The white supremacist movement in the U.S., rebranded in the 1990s as white nationalism, has a train going back to the early part of the century as it had to define its ideas as the rest of the world was leaving vulgar racialism behind. Many of the major Alt Right institutions, such as American Renaissance, VDare, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, trace back to years of white nationalism past. The difference with the Alt Right was really one of tone and class rather than ideas. There has always been a suit and tie contingent inside American white nationalism, but the Alt Right wanted to scrape the top of that intellectual layer off and crystalize it. The ideas were not much different, but they wanted to make sure that it would mimic radical movements on the left that have huge depth inside the academy.

The Alt Right, really then the Alternative Right, was a concept created by Richard Spencer with a web zine of the same name in 2010. He wanted to capture an energy he found while working at the paleoconservative magazine Taki’s Mag that was coalescing around different schools of thought. The European New Right had largely not had major texts translated into English, but they were starting to make their way over, and that was a huge foundational set of ideas for the Alt Right. Against modern conservatism, capitalism, Judeo-Christianity, and Americanism, it instead wanted an elitist, traditionalist, and aristocratic right. It broke with American conservatism, which was still founded in enlightenment values, and was open that it believed race was real, identity was fixed, and human beings were not equal. Paleoconservatism had been considered the edge of mainstream conservatism for years, so that is where a large amount of the its founding energy came from. It was white nationalism of America that ended up giving it its focus on race and its aggressive tone, which then allowed it to merge with the troll culture found on places like 4Chan and the Men’s Rights Movement.

From that cauldron it created its own synthesis, a more academic foundation for its racism, an aggressive revolutionary aspect from white nationalism, and the communities and connections from paleoconservatism.

What is the ‘Alt Light’ then?

The Alt Light is the sphere of slightly more moderate right-wing people that surround the Alt Right, giving them cover and helping to mainstream their ideas.

Fascism has always required a bridge to the mainstream. Even inside the GOP, open white nationalism is not going to bring a ton of converts on its own, it needs to have a stop over point if their ideas will have currency with the beltway. Political movements have done this in years past, whether it was the Goldwater campaign, pro-Segregationists in the 1960s, or paleoconservatism in the 1980s-90s.

Today, the battle is more cultural than traditionally political, just as the European New Right had always wanted. The ideas and community were also forged online, so it would make sense if it was online cultural figures ranting on social media rather than fringe politicians.

The most obvious of the Alt Light was Breitbart and, now, Rebel Media. Milo Yiannoupoulos was the first to really champion the Alt Right’s ideas without committing to open white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-egalitarianism. Later it would be Gavin Mcinnis and his Proud Boys, Lauren Southern, Alex Jones and the conspiracy and patriot crowd, or anti-immigrant nutjobs like Anne Coulter. The “free speech” rallies have been this in the physical world, as have many patriot militia types.

The main point is that they are often “civic nationalists” rather than racial ones: they are simply more inclusive in their authoritarian nationalism. This means, though, that the Alt Right and the Alt Light won’t agree on some of the really big questions like race and eugenics. In that way, the Alt Light, like any of these more moderate crossover movements, are built to betray their more radical counter-parts. In the end, Milo refused to really endorse the Alt Right’s racialism, the same with figures like Laura Loomer, and, therefore, they were unable to continue the relationship. This is a very traditional process as well. The more moderate folks who were helping to mainstream the white nationalists eventually betray them and leave them behind. And the alienation that those nationalists feel during this process is often what leads to desperate acts of violence.

Is it this process of marginalization that is leading to acts of Alt Right violence? Is this violence going to increase?

It is hard to say definitively that the violence of the Alt Right is going to escalate, but the pattern is pretty well established. Right now it appears as if acts of organized violence from Alt Right and white supremacist groups is increasing, especially in the wake of the “free speech” confrontations with antifascist groups and with the debacle at Charlottesville, and that violence is turning bloody. At the same time, acts of “seemingly random violence” are increasing, with the murder of Heather Heyer just being a recent example.

This process of white supremacist terrorism, which often plays out as “seemingly random violence,” is often less random than it appears. In the 1980s, after decades of failure to meettheir objectives, many insurrectionary white supremacists took to the strategies of “lone wolf” terrorism and “leaderless resistance.” These eschewed more formal revolutionary organizations for random acts of violence that were intended to have a “propaganda of the deed” effect on the white working class. They believed that these acts would spark “racial consciousness” in white people and create a race war. In periods when more conventional organizing, both community organizing and political organizing, fail to show white nationalists any results, these attacks increase exponentially. These are also mixed with the increase of violent street formations, which in years past included KKK and skinhead projects and today look more like the Proud Boysand Vanguard America.

With the massive platform denial that the Alt Right has faced since Charlottesville and the growth of a mass antifascist movement, this is largely where the Alt Right is at. Desperation, failure, and the inability to meaningfully organize leads to increased acts of violence. While the Alt Right has been hit very hard in the last few months, it isn’t gone, and its acolytes will likely turn towards violence before they simply disappear.

Antifascist organizing has seen a massive explosion with a whole number of organizations and types of projects out there. What kind of work should someone do who is just now wanting to get involved?

This really depends on who they are, where they are, and what they want to do. The honest truth is that we always want novelty in times of crisis, and there is certainly some room for that, but this is also a good opportunity to re-establish and re-enforce the organizations that have been doing this work for years. Many organizations go back more than a decade and have a great handle on antifascist praxis, from how to handle neo-Nazis taking space to doxxing and reporting detailed information to even drawing together mass coalitions. The first real step would be to look at those organizations that have a track record in doing the work and see if that is something you can connect with. This is doubly important given the very real material threat that white nationalists offer to people’s safety. Not only are they targeting marginalized communities, but they are going after those that dare to stand up to their growth, and they often target individuals and make examples of them. This means that it is important to not behave recklessly or go off half cocked, and instead work with organizers who are experienced, know how to do the work, and give it the care and respect it deserves.

The other thing would be to look at what skills and resources you bring to organizing work, and what type of organizing and projects you can fit into your life. I don’t offer this line as a way of providing an “out” to the actual organizing work, it requires organized coordination in formalized groups that are going to do the not-always-fun organizing work, but it is important to make sure that you are able to continue contributing over time. It is not uncommon to find activist projects that explode with excitement only to peter out months down the line when those doing much of the work find that it is unsustainable in the way planned. Instead, find a pace and commitment you can sustain over time because continued involved over longer periods is always going to be most effective.

I would also caution against putting too much faith in large electoral or reformist movements, they often fail to deliver the kind of movement building or direct action necessary for antifascist work. Instead, it may be good to look at organizations that have a deeper foundation in their analysis, that look at the ways that capitalism and white supremacy feed and necessitate insurrectionary fascist movements. We are not going to Democrat our way out of the rise of populism and white nationalism, and instead we are going to need to have much deeper solutions. This will also require looking towards community defense as the Alt Right and neo-Nazis pose a threat of violence. Plainly put, they are out there murdering people, and if we do not organize to stop them then this will only increase.

When did white nationalism first come on your radar? This isn’t exactly a new thing.

No, it’s not, it really has been one of the most consistent features of the white supremacist institutions of the U.S. It is really one of the ways that the system of racial injustice gets its sharp teeth. In the segregation-era South, it was insurrectionary groups like the Ku Klux Klan that helped reinforce the system through the extralegal violence of lynchings. Technically not state sanctioned, but encouraged and socially condoned anyway. White nationalism has also always existed as the sort of violent reclamation of privilege. In times of crisis, rather than choosing to target the white supremacy that enforces worker subjugation, they scramble after lost privilege and attack people of color. This violence is a consistent feature of the way white supremacy works in late capitalism, reinforcing itself repeatedly.

Continues at: https://antifascistnews.net/2017/12/16/ ... ne-burley/

[Karmamatterz]

The alt-right has a tremendous fear of the “globalists” in control of all the data they need to manipulate every aspect of the white race’s existence, down to their most trivial consumer choices: Think of it as the Mark of the Beast manifesting in the supercomputer or the dream of artificial intelligence, which to the alt-right, beholden to old-fashioned patriarchy in their self-presentation, is the ultimate nightmare. Scientific capitalism, of the highly technocratic variety, becomes for the alt-right an occult force it must contend with, comprehend for the benefit of its followers and ultimately defeat.

Wait a minute here. Who is in favor of the globalist oligarchy that controls so much of the media, finance and military? Call me naive, but I thought sane people generally have at least an awareness of such things. Walking around full of fear of such things is irrational, but criticizing someone for not liking those things seems almost as if you're wanting more of it. Call me extreme for not being a fan of AI and not wanting a Skynet scenario to trap us like fish in a barrel.

Would you consider Ted Kaczynski to be part of that alt-right patriarchy?

[82_28]

Walking around is irrational.