Antifascism 102: A Primer on White Nationist Ideologies

Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit—in private—that they were never able to get to the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest.

—William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

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CW: White ethnonationalist/neo-Nazi ideology and language.

Why am I pestering you to understand dog-whistles, though? Is white nationalism really a threat to human lives and American society? Isn’t it mostly just a bunch of manchildren raised on Call of Duty and high-fructose corn syrup, manchildren who’ve now moved on to acting out Fight Club fantasies, getting tattoos to be edgy, and trolling libtards (who, let’s be honest, kinda deserve a little trolling) with Pepe the Frog memes?

Well … no. That is, yes, there are plenty of young men in white nationalist movements who are exactly like that; and while damagingly misguided, at heart they may be as comparatively harmless as the heteroflexible stoner dude who has tortured internal monologues about whether his veganism culturally appropriates Japanese Buddhism [1] and considers Donnie Darko the most tragically neglected masterpiece of the whole of cinema. The salient difference between the latter and his white nationalist counterpart is, stoner dude is unlikely to hurt anybody.

But I digress. Yes, there are relatively innocent young men who’ve been taken in by this stuff, and whose primary problems are immaturity and a lack of good information. Whether they form a majority of white nationalists, I don’t know, and really it doesn’t matter. The destruction wrought by this ideology is going to be governed by the movement’s leaders and the ideology they enact—not by the individual guilt or innocence of its foot soldiers. And those leaders, and that ideology, are horrifying.

A key element of this ideology is the ideal of ‘ethnic replacement,’ or (in less sanitized language) ‘white genocide.’ This rests on the idea that white people of European descent do or should constitute a single ethnic group [1] or united racial or cultural identity [1], and that immigration from majority non-white regions like South America to majority white regions like the US or Western Europe poses a threat to that ethnic group. This is less out of a fear of immediate violence from brown people, though there’s fearmongering on that front as well, than out of the additional premise that non-white people will outbreed whites and dilute white ethnicity through intermarriage, and in the long run will oppress, exclude, or even expel white people and white culture—not only from political and social ascendancy in these ‘indigenously’ white homelands, but even from living there. In the words of Alex Kurtagić, who wrote a dishonest and disgusting essay titled The Great Erasure for the white supremacist National Policy Institute (headed by the infamous Richard Spencer):

Much of the debate on the decline of Whites in their traditional homelands centers on “immigration,” and specifically the continuing arrival in the West of large numbers of colored “immigrants” from the poorest regions of the world. Some critics of “immigration” feel the term is euphemistic and prefer to label the phenomenon “invasion.” Guillaume Faye [a French alt-right journalist] calls it “colonization.” … The term is not entirely inadequate, for modern “immigration” in the West involves exogenous strangers colonizing Western polities. …  

Critics of “immigration” in the West have noticed its unprecedented scale, its permanent character, and the non-assimilation/non-assimilability of Third World “immigrants.” Among the characteristics of settler colonialism is that settlers come to stay and do not appeal to the established indigenous sovereignty, but rather deny it and seek to remove it in order to replace it with a reproduction of their own society. … The process of doing so is non-violent, following a legal sequence comprising: appeal to the indigenous authority (for recognition and admission as permanent minorities, and eventually citizens; co-option of indigenous structures (lobbying for concessions, multiculturalism); subversion from without (lobbying for anti-racist legislation); and indigenization (becoming legislators, subversion from within). At the same time, the process coexists with violence, whereby the indigenous are physically attacked or subject to predations (typically muggings, robberies, racially motivated beatings, and rape), or else morally attacked (typically accusations of prejudice and “racism,” and/or “racism” hoaxes).

Yeah, nothing says “minority accusations of racism are just a hoax” like “immigrants are plotting to take over our country, and having someone who’s not a white people hold public office is part of their scheme.” Note that South Americans descended from Spanish and Portuguese colonizers for some reason don’t qualify as “White,” despite being about as European as Americans and Canadians are both culturally and historically. Note, too, that “White people” are not only treated as though they constituted a more or less unified ethnicity, which isn’t true at all, but explicitly as the indigenous inhabitants of the United States. I won’t inflict any more of Kurtagić’s repulsive drivel on you; and I’m also not linking to NPI’s website, because I am not giving neo-Nazis web traffic, but I have screenshots from the essay if anyone wants my receipts (or if they take they essay down at some later point for PR reasons).

This theory—that white (sorry, “White”) people not only form a coherent ethno-cultural group [1] which is being colonized by brown people who are going to do to us what we did to the indigenous inhabitants of North America—comes with the political program of establishing a ‘white homeland,’ an ethnostate to protect whites from being overrun or diluted by other ethnicities. [2] This conspiracy against whites is typically attributed to Marxists, Jews, and Marxist Jews, though the anti-Semitism is optional in some versions of white nationalism, which … yay? With or without the anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic tie-ins, though, the political program boils down to one fairly simple goal, approached through incremental and indirect means: ethnic cleansing.

Because really, you can’t have an ‘ethnostate’ except by conducting a purge first. Even in the ancient world, whose means of communication and transport were so much slower and more limited than our own: every society dealt with ethnic and cultural minorities in one way or another, because ethnic and cultural minorities exist in every society and the idea that there ever was a polity where they didn’t is utter fantasy. Classical Athens had its metics, Rome was a famous melting pot, the Mar Thoma Christians of India were there centuries before the Jesuits, the Holy Family were refugees in Egypt, and the Torah itself makes extensive provision for migrants and resident aliens, all derived from a single principle:

For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. —Deuteronomy 10.17-19

Nor (not to say that any migrant needs to prove their ‘usefulness’ to enjoy human dignity and rights) did the Israelites start out as very profitable strangers, when they first immigrated to Egypt. They were brought in at the behest of a gifted relative, who was himself originally taken to Egypt by human traffickers, and who had since ascended to a prestigious public office. 

The only way to achieve the goal of a white ethnostate is through ethnic cleansing; something white nationalists like Spencer are vague about in public statements, except to say that they advocate a ‘peaceful’ version of it. And I’m prepared to acknowledge that it may be less horrifically evil to forcibly uproot and expel a person from their home for the crime of being brown, than it is to judicially enslave or murder them for the crime of being brown. But I am not prepared to be impressed by the moral difference. I oppose the mere ‘peaceful’ ethnic cleansing advocate with the same conviction as I oppose the white nationalist terrorist and butcher. And these ideologies, these movements, are not harmless juvenility, however harmlessly juvenile many of the people who’ve been taken in by them may be. They are a nightmare in the making.

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[1]Hint: no.

[2]‘Fun’ fact: the state of Oregon was admitted to the Union as a free state rather than a slave state … and also had a ‘whites only’ clause in its original constitution forbidding black people to live there and expelling all blacks who already did, so that the whole slavery-vs-abolition thing could be consistently ignored. Opposition to slavery and opposition to racism were two different things in the nineteenth century, and still are—something that makes a little more sense out of the historical trajectory of the Republican Party, and something that, if all goes well for fascism (God spare us!), we may be confronted with on a more immediate level once again in the future.