Antifascism 104A: Why America?

This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, ‘But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?’ He replied with total gravity—he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar—‘Yes, but in England it’s true.’ To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can, however, produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe, it may shade off into that popular racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid. 

… If our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them. In the nineteenth century, the English became very conscious of such duties: the ‘white man’s burden.’ What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians. … And yet this showed the sense of superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed the rights, not the duties. 

—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

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But why is this even happening? How is it fascism, of all ideologies, getting a comeback tour? Weren't the upsets of Fascist Italy in 1943, Nazi Germany in 1945, and Nationalist Spain in 1974, enough to establish that this is a political dead-end?

Honestly, no—for a mixture of reasons, some more thoroughly unflattering than others. In this post I will begin to address just two of the relevant culprits. One is the nature of fascism, and the other is the history of American politics.

Let's start with that second one first. We all know, in a vague and general way, that the U.S., like a child who has thrown up only once, is not done getting racism out of its system. Our almost-definable right, infighting-riddled left, and aggressively shapeless center all insincerely and equivocally agree about that. What our various factions disagree about is what racism consists in, how it manifests itself, and how to correct it; so, most things. Two rough models of what an American might mean by racism can be described. I’ll refer to these models as the Whig and the Jacobin, because I feel like it. Most self-described conservatives in this country use the Whig model, and most self-described liberals, the Jacobin.

The Whig model defines racism as being primarily an issue of personal arrogance, prejudice, and dislike, and thus as a primarily moral issue. Racial bigotry and spite are acknowledged to be real problems and (by Christian Whigs) serious sins, but insofar as the problem is a moral one of individual attitudes, a systemic solution is neither called for nor helpful, on this view—and most Whigs, while they will allow that government interventions are occasionally necessary, maintain that the government is even less to be trusted than the individual and that its interventions (whether political or judicial) are to be avoided accordingly.

By contrast, the Jacobin model defines racism as being primarily an issue of power dynamics among groups of people. (The groups in question may be socially constructed, and so in a sense artificial, but this does not make them fake, any more than the fact that a house is a construct rather than an organic growth means the house is fake.) Racism is, primarily, a tool for keeping racial minorities—black, brown, red, or yellow—at a group-wide disadvantage as compared to whites; the occasional excelling minority person is not a threat to this system, because it is precisely occasional and exceptional. Reform of these diseased systems is therefore both necessary and appropriate as a response.

Thus you can have a Republican (Whig model) arguing with a Democrat (Jacobin model), or a Green (Jacobin model) arguing with an Independent (Whig model), and they can all be agreeing that racism is bad and yet coming away from the discussion each thinking the other is a total idiot. I don’t know that I personally have ever met a Republican who didn’t admit both that the South is pretty racist, and that that was a serious problem; but they’re basing that belief on the stereotype (fair or not) that more Southerners are personally disdainful of black people than elsewhere in the country, not that the South has more egregious systemic problems. Even if the latter were true, and acknowledged to be true by the Republicans I’ve met, it wouldn’t enter into their calculations of racism (although it might enter into their view of a society’s general healthiness, independent of its political structure). A shared term with a disputed definition is worthless. [1]

It’s no secret that I think both the Whig and the Jacobin approaches, insofar as they can be reconciled, are right; and I think they can be reconciled a lot more than many of their proponents think. Any social and political system is more than the sum of its parts, and having laws and systems that encourage (even if they cannot compel) a just outcome is desirable: that is the Jacobin side. But it must also be recognized that every system is constructed and enforced by individual people, individuals who aren’t necessarily better than anybody they’re drafting laws and policies for: that is the Whig side. I don’t consider this problem totally insoluble—but it’s a genuine problem.

But here’s the thing. American history has a lot of systemic keeping-the-coloreds-down shit in our history, quite apart from slavery. Segregation is the ur-example: ‘separate but equal’ was the mantra, but it was obvious to anyone who wanted to look that the separation was into two flagrantly unequal segments of the populace, and anyway, why have a separation in the first place if we’re equal citizens? Or there’s the Muskogee syphilis experiments, or the Japanese-American internment camps of the 1940s, or the current US policy of ripping families apart for requesting asylum (something that can only be done on US soil). The US treatment of First Nations is an equally egregious: one of the less-publicized facts about the Dakota Access Pipeline that caused so much controversy in 2016 and 2017, was the fact that it violated the territorial sovereignty of the Sioux tribes in the area, which the US had guaranteed by multiple treaties. A white-centric idea of America may have arisen from individual prejudices first; it is surely not something that can be totally eradicated by law, because laws aren’t perfect; but it is something that’s incarnated in our history, our habits, and even our laws—not just a phenomenon of individually awful human beings.

Fascist ethnonationalism plays to this. Not many people would want to go to bat for everything the US government has ever done, but not many people would want to go through and repent of all of it, either. The exercise would be exhausting. And fascism offers a way around it, a way to define all those whiny brown and black and yellow and red people as Somebody Else: as critics of America rather than wronged Americans, people whom we therefore don’t have to listen to—because who can really blame any nation for looking after itself? It’s what we have nations for, isn’t it? All of these Other People should go to their own nations if they want to complain about it!

By defining itself in terms of ethnicity and appealing to a colonial history defined by whites, modern fascism makes itself instantly appealing to people who are bothered by a sense of socio-historical guilt, but aren’t sure what to do with it, or resent it, or just find the people who talk about it insufferable. (To be fair, many people who talk about socio-historical guilt are insufferable: being right does not make a person pleasant.) It’s pretty natural that this should become appealing at some point following the early successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. If anything, it’s something of a miracle that it took this long to do so.

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[1] Of the two definitions, I’ll confess to having more sympathy with the Whig one, partly because it’s the understanding I grew up with, and partly because it does often seem to animate the use of the term by leftists and liberals. I mean, when a journalist or a politician calls somebody a racist, I doubt they even frequently mean ‘You participate in a system that disfavors nonwhite racial groups!’, nor would that term be very useful if they did, since (on Jacobin principles) that described basically everyone in the US. Rather, what I take them to mean is closer to ‘You’re bigoted against people of nonwhite races!’ And while we can never be completely certain of that charge, we can be certain enough to make the term a useful one.

Nonetheless, the thing that the Jacobin usage defines as racism is a real thing, and merits a term to denote it. I don’t know that I have a good alternative; ‘systemic bias,’ maybe?

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.

Antifascism 101: A Beginner's Guide to Dog-Whistles

The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds. Wherever we meet the word, our natural impulse will be to give it that sense. When this operation results in nonsense, of course, we see our mistake and try over again. But if it makes tolerable sense our tendency is to go merrily on. I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings. 

—C. S. Lewis, Studies In Words

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Content Warning: Hate symbols and hate speech. Note that I will probably be engaging in some pretty dark humor to keep my spirits up because this stuff is fucking depressing.

What are dog-whistles, and why am I bothering you about them? Basically, dog-whistles are coded signals that will destroy our civilization, like everything else will; and I’m bothering you about them because I have no idea whether my fan base and Natalie Wynn’s have a lot of overlap, or whether it’s mostly just me, Ganymede, Basil Fitzgerald, and my sister.

Dog-whistles are key terms, phrases, and symbols (ranging from icons to gestures to memes) that members of a group can use to signal to each other that they’re part of the group, without revealing it to outsiders. The name comes from the literal dog-whistle: it sounds at a pitch too high for human ears to perceive, but dogs hear it just fine. To work, dog-whistles have to have another meaning in mainstream discourse; if they don’t, they may be private signals but they are not dog-whistles, because they identify the user as part of something unusual even if the general reader may not know what specifically.

Of course, dog-whistles are not necessarily a bad thing. Fan communities use dog-whistles (among other signals) all the time, for the pleasure of discovering each other in contexts that aren’t fan-specific the way chat boards and conventions are. A lot of early Christian symbolism consisted in dog-whistles: St Clement of Alexandria counseled Christians who needed symbols for signet rings (an important way of authenticating documents) recommended symbols susceptible to Christians interpretations like doves, harps, ships, and fish, as an alternative to depictions of gods or instruments of violence, during a period when the blatant depiction of a cross would have exposed its user instantly. Christians living under persecution have adopted the same means of survival in later ages. The Buddhist-Shinto figure of Kannon in Japan was often used by Japanese Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as a coded emblem of the Virgin—especially since she was a patroness of mothers and was often depicted holding a child. Dog-whistles can be a necessary way to communicate while maintaining secrecy, and secrecy can save lives.

But in the early twenty-first century, they have been put to sinister use by white supremacists. Overtly racist ideologies have been unacceptable in mainstream American political discourse for almost two generations now, as have most forms of totalitarianism, especially fascism and Communism. [1] But this doesn’t mean those things have gone away, nor that they are restricted to blatantly racist gangs like the Aryan Nation or the Klan. Every group—including fringe groups like Scientologists, flat-earthers, anarchists, and guys who still think Jamba Juice is good for you [2]—includes smart, cunning members who know perfectly well that they and their beliefs will be rejected if they’re revealed outright, and are prepared to strategize accordingly.

The ideal white supremacist dog-whistle is one that allows its user (let us call him Pye D. Piper) to say something perfectly innocuous, even something that any reasonable person would probably agree with, while simultaneously sending a different, coded message to fellow white supremacists so that they know the lay of the land. This has the double benefit of encouraging the white supremacist community, and also of deceiving ordinary people into supporting Mr Piper, or at least into considering him reasonable and harmless, when really he is playing a long game to advance white supremacist goals and ideology.

For people who aren’t white supremacists planning to fuck me over—when my crime is merely that of being a degenerate old queen with left-wing internationalist ideas, ‘whose religion involves allegiance to a foreign power,’ [3] and who opposes fascism, racism, classism, capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Brett Ratner’s continued liberty to direct films—a word of caution is in order. One of the dangerous and frustrating things about dog-whistles is that they are, in themselves, innocuous. For instance, you may have heard about the OK sign attracting criticism as a racist code-signal: it got attention during the Kavanaugh hearings, for instance. Obviously the OK hand gesture is not an intrinsically racist symbol; no symbol is; it was not originally cooked up by racists, nor does it have a typically racist history behind it. It was adopted by white supremacists precisely because it was both recognizable and innocuous, and thus, for dog-whistling purposes, absolutely perfect. (That’s how the swastika itself started out. And even today, there are contexts like Jain and Buddhist iconography in which the swastika is just itself, a shape, without the hideous meaning we associate it with here in the West.) So the mere fact that someone uses certain dog-whistles doesn’t automatically mean they’re a crypto-facist. They could be an ordinary centrist or a good-faith conservative who’s been listening to Pye D. Piper and is humming the same tune in consequence.

And due to what makes dog-whistles work, the better-known a dog-whistle is, the less likely it is to represent a real white supremacist as opposed to someone who ran across it in perfect innocence and happened to repeat or reuse it for whatever reason. The list below may easily be obsolete within months, if it isn’t already. So, yeah, be aware that this could make you a little paranoid, and be careful not to tar and feather people too readily.

Here follows a non-exhaustive list of dog-whistles. I’ve arranged them into symbols, terms and slogans, and gestures; I’ve also given a brief run-down on the basic description, the origin of the thing (if I know anything about it), and how it’s used today (as far as I’m aware, and with the proviso that these uses can and will change as soon as outsiders start to recognize the dog-whistles for what they are).

Shit gets gross after this. Please be aware.

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The Swastika

Description: A cross shape with equal-length arms that are each bent at a right angle, all the bends pointing in the same direction.

Origin: A common device in art throughout Eurasia for tens of thousands of years; in some cultures it represents the sun. Formerly called the gammadion or the fylfot in English.

Use: Expired. The Nazi use of the swastika is so generally known that it doesn’t keep anything secret. Variations on the swastika and similar symbols may still see some usage, like the Thunder Cross and the Hands of Svarog (shown below), which some neopagans use.

The Black Sun

Description: A set of concentric circles with twelve Sig runes radiating from the center.

Origin: Though drawing on older symbols (including the swastika), the black sun shown here is first recorded as a design element in the 1936-1942 remodeling of Wewelsburg castle. Heinrich Himmler had purchased the castle in 1933 to serve as an SS center.

Use: Current. As a relatively simple geometric pattern, it’s easy to spot when you’re looking for it and easy to miss when you’re not. Its use has been complicated slightly by the fact that the Church of Satan has also employed the black sun; so, uh, give them the benefit of the doubt that they might just be Satanists, I guess.

The Wheel Cross

Description: A cross (usually with all four arms equal in length) with a halo or ring around the center; the arms may or may not extend past the ring.

Origin: Ringed crosses are a fairly obvious shape, but their best-known use is as symbols of Celtic Christianity, in which haloed crosses were extremely popular. Wheel crosses also resemble the usual guiding lines for firearm sights; the Zodiac killer used a form of the wheel cross as his personal sigil.

Use: Current. Thankfully, genuine Celtic stuff employs more specific forms like bell-flared cross arms, and elaborate decoration like trefoil knots.

The Iron Cross

Description: A cross (typically black) with equal-length, curve-flared arms, usually with an outlining band around its edge.

Origin: One of many heraldic forms of the Christian cross; the iron cross is a particular variant of the croix pattée, which always has equal-length, flared arms, but the flaring can take different forms (e.g. the Templars’ cross had small, angular flares at the end of each arm). The iron cross is a traditional military decoration, going back through Germany’s history and into the Kingdom of Prussia.

Use: Current.

The Odal Rune

Description: A diamond shape with its two lower sides extended into crossed arms.

Origin: One of the letters of the Elder Futhark, the earliest rune alphabet. (The Younger Futhark of Scandinavia and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc are both descended from the Elder Futhark.) The Odal or Othala rune represented the o sound, and was named from the Common Germanic term ōþala, which could mean ‘lineage, descent’ or ‘inheritance, property, estate.’ Cf. Blood and Soil below.

Use: Current. Not many people outside certain fan communities and scholarly fields recognize any Germanic runes, and are likelier to assume that they’re references to Lord of the Rings than neo-fascist cosplay. Neopagans, especially those who follow Odinism or Asatru, also use this rune and many others as an inheritance from pre-Christian Germanic culture.

The Sig Rune

Description: Similar to a backwards, capital N with the vertical bars extended (thus resembling a stylized lightning bolt).

Origin: Another rune, but unlike the Othala rune, this one is derived from the Armanen runes of Austrian occultist Guido von List. An apostate from Catholicism who devoted himself to neo-pagan mysticism and racism—‘Ariosophy’ was his name for it—he claimed to have received a new formulary of the runic system in a vision (sure), expounding eighteen reformed runes, of which the eleventh was Sig. A pair of Sig runes was one of the insignia of the Nazi SS, partly because they looked like an angularized pair of s’s, and partly because the Nazis associated the rune’s name with the word Sieg, ‘victory.’

Use: Somewhat current, both independently and as an element in the black sun above. However, it is recognizable enough in doubled form as an element in a Nazi flag that it’s not likely to be used as often.

The Man Rune

Description: Similar to a capital Y with a third branch extending straight up.

Origin: Why hello again, totally unhistorical Armanen runes! Derived from the Algiz rune of the Elder Futhark, with the same shape but a different phonetic value. Often known as the ‘life rune,’ as far as I can tell on the basis of ‘literally no gorram reason whatsoever.’

Use: Current. This one is particularly insidious due to its similarity to a wide variety of totally innocent symbols. The Yr rune, which is the inverted form, is also used occasionally, and is, you guessed it, often known as the ‘death rune.’

Guys, if you need a hug you can just say so.

14

Origin: A reference to the Fourteen Words, a slogan concocted by white supremacist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” A more forthcoming alternate is “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth” and my God you people, chill the fuck out. Nobody’s trying to make white women stop existing. As you so creepily demonstrate, white women are popular.

Use: Current. Making numbers look harmless is super easy. May be combined with 88, explained below.

18

Origin: Alphanumeric code for AH, i.e. Adolf Hitler; likely also an allusion to the 18 Armanen runes.

Use: Current.

88

Origin: An allusion to David Lane’s 88 Precepts, a white nationalist manifesto; also alphanumeric code for HH, i.e. Heil Hitler.

Use: Current. Frequently combined with 14 as 1488, 8814, or 14/88; Lane claimed that the number 1488 was a key element in his (SIGH) Pyramid Prophecy, which apparently espouses literally every conspiracy theory: Aryans built the pyramids, the King James Bible is a Hermetic code text foretelling Lane’s own birth and work, and Francis Bacon was secretly Shakespeare.

“Blood and Soil”

Origin: An ethnonationalist catchphrase cooked up by the Nazi party (German: Blut und Boden). Used to express the idealized, racially ‘pure’ and geographically rooted ethnostate.

Use: Expired, as it’s a giveaway to anyone with more than a slight acquaintance with Nazi history. The rioters at Charlottesville in 2017 chanted it, along with “White Lives Matter” and “You will not replace us.”

Fine people on both sides.

“Ethnic Replacement”

Origin: A newer alternative to “white genocide,” coined when that phrase started to seem too dramatic. Basically this denotes a key concept in white supremacist ideology: that majority-white countries are being taken over by immigrants (optional extra: BECAUSE OF JEWS), who will hog all our resources and/or intermarry with whites, thus diluting and ultimately eliminating “the white race.”

Use: Somewhat current. It’s getting recognizable enough to act as a regular whistle instead of a dog-whistle, and is likely to expire soon accordingly.

“Race Realism”

Origin: Sounded better than “I’m really racist.” The phrase denotes a belief in (ugh) so-called “scientific racism,” the notion that there are empirical grounds for (i) classifying people into biologically different races that are (ii) typically ranked by intelligence, and considered superior or inferior accordingly. There’s also “sex realism,” which sounds better than “raving misogyny.”

Use: Nearly expired, I think. It is pretty transparent. The concept is often reached without the catchphrase, usually by starting with an ostensibly positive, widely-held stereotype about a non-white ethnicity (“Look, you’d agree that Asians tend to have higher IQs, right?”) and then … well, I was going to say ‘deteriorates,’ but it ain’t exactly starting fresh.

“Western culture”

Origin: White nationalists love to think of themselves as defending Western civilization against the incursion of foreigners, especially brown and/or Muslim foreigners. (The fact that a lot of the brown foreigners, namely Latino immigrants, are as Western as anybody in the US and more Western than some, gets lost in here—I can’t think why.) More importantly, Western culture has in fact accomplished great things in addition to horrible things, so it’s an easy way to lure centrists, good-faith conservatives, and many liberals. If the white nationalist in question is a Christian, expect the Jewishness of Christianity to be downplayed or (in extreme cases) outright denied—though support for Israel as an (ethno-)state probably won’t be; if the white nationalist in question is an atheist or a neopagan, expect the Jewishness of Christianity to be played up as a reason to object to it, along with its deeply-rooted rejection of racial hatreds and its encouragement of “slave morality.”

Use: Current as hell, and it pisses me off, since I treasure Western culture even while I recognize its many flaws and sins. This one is a great dog-whistle for white racists, because as long as Western culture doesn’t become irreclaimably identified with white nationalism, there will always be an innocuous way to interpret “defenses” of it.

“Identitarian”

Origin: Sounded better than “I’m really, really racist.” The name comes from the French group Bloc Identitaire, a nationalist movement with a patchwork of right-wing ideologies (though generally united by their hostility to Islam). A number of white nationalist organizations, such as the American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa) and the National Policy Institute (hi, Richard Spencer!). Racists of all kinds do tend to be preoccupied with ethnic identity, pretty much by definition, and white supremacists are no exception.

Use: Current—I think. It’s hard to tell.

The Roman Salute

Description: One hand is raised, usually at an angle and from the shoulder, with the palm facing down and the fingers together.

Origin: The Roman salute actually does go back to ancient Rome; even white supremacists don’t get every historical detail wrong (just most of them.) Mussolini adopted it for the Fascisti, and Hitler liked it enough to import it for the Nazis.

Use: Expired—kind of? It is immediately recognizable, and therefore much of its use as a private code signal is gone. Yet, for some reason, it remains easier to claim that using the Roman salute is “just being edgy and ironic” than it is to claim that bandying a swastika around is “just being edgy and ironic.”

The Volksfront Gesture

Description: A V-shaped hand sign, along the lines of the Vulcan salutation but without the thumb, often held over the heart.

Origin: Basically a gang sign, invented by the white supremacist group Volksfront. Volk is the German word for ‘people, nation,’ and since these are or should be the same thing as ‘ethnicity’ in white nationalist ideology, the word’s a popular one.

Use: Current, possibly; I don’t claim to have picked up on it. But of course it’s like the black sun symbol: plain as day if you’re looking for it, inconspicuous if you’re not.

The OK Sign

Description: Thumb and forefinger together in a circle, with the other three fingers extended.

Origin: As a gesture, this one’s obviously much older than its appropriation by ethnonationalists; it’s also a perfect example of the bottomlessly ambiguous atmosphere that crypto-fascists use to both communicate with each other, and at the same time gaslight the people who suspect them. Its association with neo-Nazis and the like is obviously arbitrary, which makes it easy to dismiss as just an example of left-wing paranoia. Moreover, it is, or seems to be, recent—as recent as 2017. It’s unclear whether the gesture became associated with white supremacism by their own design, through a 4chan prank, or by their own design which they then covered up through a 4chan prank. The Christchurch mosque shooter has famously flashed the OK sign in court, I guess because shooting a bunch of innocent Muslims, praising Trump for inspiring white nationalists worldwide, and donating hundreds of Euros to an Austrian neo-fascist didn’t sufficiently establish his racist street cred.

Use: Expired? Current? Honestly this one could be anywhere on the map, it’s so muddied.

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If you are involved in a hate group, you need to get out now. These two sentences are composed entirely of links to various groups that can help you escape.

Like I said above, this list is not exhaustive, nor could it be since dog-whistles are constantly in flux. But I sort of feel like vomiting, so I’m done for now.

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[1] Yes, I'm aware that there are non-totalitarian, non-Stalinist, non-statist versions of Communism. No, I haven't yet read Horkheimer, Bakunin, Goldman, Zetkin, Gramsci, Grindelwald, Sluterevski, and OH MY GOD GET OFF MY LAWN. [2]

[2] If you caught the dog-whistles, congratulations, and all hail Party Monster and Dark Mother.

[3] Thanks for that gem, Locke.

Suffer Little Children

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness. —That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government … The History of the present King of Great Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World. 

He has refused his Assent to Laws, most wholesome and necessary for the public Good. … He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither … He has obstructed the Administration of Justice …

—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence of the United States

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The Trump administration is separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents and keeping said children in detention centers. Some of these children are less than two years old.

This is a gross abuse of human and familial rights—I don't care what your general perspective on politics is. Two things, and two things only, justify ripping a child away from its parents: abuse or neglect that endanger the child's life or health, and incapacity (financial or otherwise) to care for the child. 'Being an immigrant,' documented or not, isn't either of those things.

Also, let's be a little more clear what we mean when we talk about 'detention centers.' They're fucking cages. Like animals. As President Trump said they were. This is no civilized enforcement of federal law, this is ethnic goddamned cleansing.

Oh, but it's not really an ethnic cleansing because it's only of people who came here illegally? Sure. And Hitler protected his old friend and chauffeur Emil Maurice from Himmler, even though Maurice was an eighth Jewish. Racists, it turns out, are not always very consistent. And sure, maybe, maybe, Trump isn't a racist, even though he referred to Latino nations as shitholes and Latino people as animals and neo-Nazis as having good people among them. In all seriousness, a person could do those things and not believe that other races are inferior to theirs—though they would still be doing and saying horrible things. Meanwhile, tearing families apart is still fucking monstrous.

Also, let's park for a moment on the whole concept of legality and illegality. The point of having laws is to enforce justice. Strictly speaking, and following St Augustine and many other doctors of the Church, an unjust law has no force. So it is quite pertinent to ask whether the immigration policies of the United States are in fact just.

They sure don't make sense in the context of the Founding Fathers' writings on the subject, as cited above. Inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. well-being, both physical and otherwise) don't support the idea of a closed border on the face of it—I mean, insofar as a closed border is literally a bar to liberty and, for the overwhelming majority of the immigrants in question here, also a bar to the pursuit of happiness. The fact that immigrating legally can easily take a few years, several thousand dollars, and a flawless attention to Kafkaesque details is just icing; though this is one of those storebought cakes where the icing is about eight feet thick. And, much like those storebought cakes, a lot of the people who need and want to immigrate the most, due to violence and destitution and a lot of other things, can't afford to spend two years and five thousand dollars on doing so. Which, in practice, makes American immigration law not a ban on immigrants, but a ban on poor ones.

It might be argued that our health care system is overburdened and we can't afford these new people, and so on. I am not convinced of that. To begin with, as of 2017, the IMF rated the United States as one of the twenty wealthiest countries, per capita, in the world. We're ranked with places like Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Hong Kong, and the UAE (home of the cartoonishly affluent Dubai). I can easily believe that we as a people aren't willing to allocate enough of our money to the public good to support an influx of new people; or, more briefly, I can believe that we'd refuse to afford these new people. But I do not believe we can't. And I don't see why our selfishness should be their problem.

Further, there's the fact that our birthrate in the US has declined. In the long run, fewer babies means an aging population; and an aging population does mean a serious strain in our health care system—one that only new workers, both as producers of goods and services, and as sources of tax revenue, could relieve. But neither the prudential nor the legal aspects of this ghastly situation are, to me, primary.

Pilgrim praying in front of icon of Saint Mary, photo by Petar Milosevic

Are you a family values conservative? Keeping kids with their parents is pretty central to family values, and the Trump administration has betrayed that ideal. They are trying to manipulate you. Don't fall for it.

Do you reverence Scripture? Leviticus 19 says, If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the strangeth that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God; and in the same style, Deuteronomy 10 says, The LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and the widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger. The apostles repeat the same principle in the New Testament: the author of Hebrews commands us, Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares; and our Lord himself relates the following, in a frightening parable:

When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you; for I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, unto everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. —Matt. 25

Christ's teaching was directed to individuals, not to societies? The Torah wasn't. The Torah was delivered only to Israel? Christ's teaching wasn't. And Christ's teaching both presupposed and at times expressly stated the validity of the Torah; and the Torah was made more toweringly perfect and unfathomably pure, not less so, by Christ's own teaching.

Christian, you must oppose this barbaric treatment of immigrants. It's not optional. It's not the difference between being a Christian and not being one; that difference is defined by the creeds. But it is the difference between honoring the Lord whose name you bear by putting his word before everything, and taking that name in vain to protect a President who doesn't deserve even your respect, let alone your worship.

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The Omen of Charlottesville

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight …

—William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

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First things first: for Heather Heyer, killed while protesting in Charlottesville last week: Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon her. Amen. ✠ May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen. ✠

Now then.

It should be, but isn’t, unnecessary to argue over whether the rally in Charlottesville was white supremacist. I can certainly allow that individuals who attended it, or who sympathized with its objection to taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee, were not. And yet—when the chosen symbols of the ralliers include swastikas, Nazi salutes, and such slogans as ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘Blood and soil,’ it ceases to be unfair to say that the people who chose those symbols are white supremacists. If you wish to persuade me that that rally was not white supremacist, you will have to explain what isn’t openly and horrifyingly racist to adopt the symbols and catchphrases of a perpetrator of race-based genocide. And while I have no wish to paint with a broad brush, I shall be bold to say that even people who aren’t racists themselves, but who are content to keep that sort of company for the sake of their political opinions, should ask themselves a few searching questions about those opinions.

Please note the Klansman at the lower left: this is not a man you should be comfortable next to, physically or politically.

Again, it should be unnecessary to point out that racism in any form at all is totally untenable for the Christian. One of the earliest difficulties in the Church was ethnic strife between Palestinian and European Jewish Christians, and the Apostles chose to solve it by creating the office of the diaconate, which was promptly filled exclusively by members of the racial minority.1 The single most important dispute in the first century was over whether Gentiles as Gentiles were eligible to become Christians, or whether they had to be Judaized as well; St Paul, who wrote more of the New Testament than any other single author, spent half his career battling and denouncing that one idea, calling it not merely a mistake but a false gospel. The miracle of tongues at Pentecost exhibited the coïnherence of man as man, not as this race against that; and the coïnherence is displayed again in what professes to be a vision of humanity released from the limits and illusions of sin and mortality:

After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God.2

And white supremacism is, for the Catholic, an especially silly version of heresy. Not only because white is barely an ethnicity at all.3 But because we worship a brown Middle-Eastern Jew. When God chose to take on flesh and be born of a Mother, He chose to be born a Jew. If race means anything (which, no), Caucasians are, at highest, decidedly second-fiddle.

What, then, must the Christian be prepared to do in the times we evidently live in?

1. Call racism out for what it is, without making excuses for it. As a rule of thumb: any sentence about groups who employ white supremacist or neo-Nazi symbols and ideology that begins with the words ‘Not all of them were …’, isn’t really worth finishing. Even if it’s true that not all of them were, enough of them were. And it isn’t as though most philosophical racists are going to approach you on the street and proselytize with, ‘Have you heard about how white people are intrinsically superior?’ They’re going to start with something that sounds safe and plausible; and then keep pushing the line of what’s plausible a little further, and a little further, and a little further still. It’s what’s been happening for the last decade, whether intentionally or unconsciously.

2. Look for the good in your opponents. People don’t just wake up one day and think, ‘Hmm, say, what if from now on I were just awful?’ There’s nearly always a hurt or an unmet need or a misunderstanding at the back of it. The image of God is easily defaced, but it is hard to erase it completely. There are sociopaths and monsters out there; but they are exceedingly few, and I’ve found by experiment that some of the people most of us would dismiss as obvious instances of sociopathy are nothing of the kind, and that (a lot of) patient reason and kindness can actually reach them.

Looking for the good in your opponent for compassion’s sake is, I think, the best motive. It’s certainly the reason we are given in the Gospels. But there is another and more pragmatic motive. Since most people don’t get into evil for the lulz, they generally have a reason—bad or good, personal or principled, reflective or habitual. If you don’t understand that reason, you’re fighting blind. It’s nearly always the good in an evil thing that gives it its energy, not the bad; if you can’t find and appeal to that good, it’s going to be nearly impossible to combat the evil it’s energizing, except by destroying the evildoer, and we have laws about that.

3. Be prepared to defy the government. I’d hope that every Christian would take this for granted. The Church came into existence as an illegal, underground faith, and has always had a stormy relationship with the civil powers even when she had pride of place among them. If the government pursues a racist or nationalist agenda, whether by active injustice or by mere neglect, the believer has the right and the duty not to obey commands that support that agenda.

This is easy to write, and hard to do. But there’s a reason inspiring stories get told: sometimes, they inspire.

Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag. And your lecteurial love for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn never more intense. ‘How much does the Soviet Union weigh?’ Stalin once rhetorically asked a team of interrogators who were having difficulty in breaking a suspect. He meant that no individual could withstand the concerted mass of the state. In February 1974 the Moscow Cheka served Solzhenitsyn with a summons. Instead of signing the receipt, he returned the envelope with a statement that began:

In the circumstances created by the universal and unrelieved illegality enthroned for many years in our country … I refuse to acknowledge the legality of your summons and shall not report for questioning to any agency of the state.

And, for that moment, the Soviet Union and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn weighed about the same.4

Will it come to that? I hope not. I don’t want to find out that I’m not as badass as Solzhenitsyn when there’s something depending on it. But it could come to that, and while we may fail out of weakness, we should at least know our duty, in case it ever needs doing.

Like this, but with more torture and less subtle homoeroticism.

4. Be suspicious of the media. Even if they meant well in every case, the media can’t even predict the weather. And everybody, even the well-meaning, has some sort of slant. It isn’t necessarily insincere or malicious or even secret. But every news source is going to be guided, to some extent, by what it expects or assumes to be true; and they all have a vested interesting in being attention-grabbing more than in being accurate—it’s how they get clicks and attract viewers and sell newspapers. And the more a source shares your preconceptions or affirms what you’d like to be true, the more easily it will hoodwink you, no matter what your political alignment is.

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1We know this because all seven of the first deacons have Greek names, indicating that they were of Hellenistic descent, i.e. they came from the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean rather than from the Holy Land, where the Jews still spoke Aramaic. For the story itself, see Acts 6.1-7.

2Apocalypse 7.9-11.

3I forget the source, but one of my friends recently reposted a very good mini-essay on why black pride is a thing but white pride isn’t. Namely, white pride is in one sense a thing, i.e., we have celebrations of Irish and German and Italian and Scottish and Swedish heritage, and so forth; because (to oversimplify) white people can trace their ancestry back thus, at least in a general way, sometimes quite specifically. Black people, by contrast, are mostly the descendants of slaves, and their family traditions were accordingly destroyed or distorted beyond all recognition; their shared experience as a minority in a mostly-white country is, for many of them, as much history as they have, and is an authentic history as far as it goes; celebrations of Ghanan and Congolese and Igbo heritage are lacking because they were taken away and destroyed, not because of some overarching blackness that supersedes those things. By contrast, white, voluntary immigrants to this country, even when they were despised by the elites, were able to maintain their cultural identity in an unbroken tradition. The (vaguely so-called) Native American peoples were able to do the same thing, which is why we still have things like Cherokee or Lakota or Hopi culture.

4Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, p. 59. (Koba was a nickname of Stalin. The Cheka was the ‘Emergency Commission’ of the USSR, i.e. a pack of bureaucratic thugs with the job of torture and judicial murder.)