The Politics of Identity
RACE IS THE lodestone of the Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism, the guiding
principle of their historical and political worldview. American neo-Nazism,
represented by George Lincoln Rockwell and his successors, adopted the Nazi
view of the Jews as the ferment of liberal society, variously promoting communism, civil rights and race mixing. However, by the late 1950s such neoNazism was primarily driven by white opposition to civil rights for blacks, integration, busing, and affirmative action. Similarly, British neo-Nazi groups
arose as a response to the fast-rising levels of colored immigration from the
late 1950s onward. The American neo-Nazi slogan “white power” was paralleled by the call to “keep Britain white.” As American blacks began to benefit
from civil rights legislation and colored immigrants began to establish themselves politically in Britain in the 1980s, neo-Nazi groups began to suggest
that white racial dominance was threatened in the ancestral homelands of
white ethnic stock.
However, the racist far right has not grown in a vacuum. Although liberal
opinion in the United States and Britain is determinedly opposed to racism,
a number of factors in Western politics have worked to reintroduce race as a
legitimate category of group identification. During the 1960s black power
groups and radical critics called for the official recognition of “minority”
group status and restitutive action by the state. The instititionalization of
these demands led to extensive programs of equal opportunities and affirmative action in the provision of public services, employment and education
to favor American blacks. A gradual transmutation of civil-rights law has led
to the reorientation of these programs from equal opportunities toward the
equal outcomes of racial quotas. This attribution of special benefits and
privileges on the basis of ascriptive group membership is an unprecedented
and remarkable deviation from the Anglo-American tradition of individual
rights.1
The discriminatory effects of these policies on whites, both potential
and actual, has understandably caused some resentment among whites.
303Government-mandated privileges on the basis of race have in turn fostered
the growth of the racist far right.
But liberal support for affirmative action has gone further in producing a
climate of white guilt. The causes of black crime, drug involvement and welfare dependence are often sought in white racism. Black on white crime in
terms of murder, rape and robbery with violence is many times greater than
white on black crime. However, the national media typically highlight instances of white racial attacks, while many reports of black crime are “colorblind” and mostly confined to the local press. The massive overrepresentation
of blacks in the penal system, evident testimony of black crime, violence and
underperformance are largely ignored by the liberal media, or otherwise invoked as further evidence of black disadvantage and white racism.2
The comparative high performance of Asian minorities in education and employment, and their corresponding underrepresentation in prison statistics,
demonstrate the untenability of attributing black failure to white racism. The
precoccupation with white responsibility for the failure of race relations also
ignores the high incidence of interethnic crime and violence. This disabling
of white criticism through accusations of individual and “institutional”
racism, coupled with a compensatory attitude toward black identity, has been
a further factor in the stimulation of the racist far right.
Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the
decline of white power in the world. The cultural pessimism of Julius Evola,
Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano all express the fear of (Aryan) white submergence in a degenerate age dominated by social and racial inferiors. Their adoption of Hindu chronology is intended to plot the curve of that decline into the
Kali Yuga with the millennial promise of regeneration through a new golden
age in the cycle of the ages. Francis Parker Yockey likewise articulates a mythic
philosophy of history, whereby the European races are (temporarily) disabled
by alien Jewish influences and prevented from fulfilling their destiny in a powerful new Imperium or world empire. Addressing a more narrow Germanspeaking audience, Wilhelm Landig elaborates a neo-völkisch mythology of
Aryan origins in northern Thule, in order to prophesy the recovery and resurrection of Nazi Germany. The Black Sun and Nazi UFO myths perform a similar if provincial function for German neo-Nazis who lament the loss of World
War II and the triumph of liberalism in the international order.
However, while George Lincoln Rockwell, Colin Jordan, Wilhelm Landig
and Ernst Zündel hark back to Nazi models and an epic narrative of World
War II to counter postwar liberalism and its supposed Jewish architects, their
recent successors, especially in the United States, tend to invoke quasi-völkisch
mythologies of white identity and destiny. Our review of Christian Identity
304 CONCLUSIONgroups, the Church of the Creator, and Nordic racial pagans indicates a more
diffuse defensive ideology than that of straightforward German National Socialism. Commentators have noted the rise of a new nationalism as a culture
of resistance to the recent forces of globalization and immigration. It is thus
highly significant that the Aryan cult of white identity is now most marked in
the United States, where the challenges of multiculturalism and Third World
immigration have been the greatest.
Race relations based on the civil rights of American blacks and the assimilation of New Commonwealth immigrants in Britain have long since been
overtaken by the rise of Third World immigration, refugees and asylum seekers. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 in the United States abolished the
national-origins system of 1924 and has arguably changed America more
than any other legislation in the twentieth century. This law was initially intended to redress the imbalance of immigrant stock between northern and
southern Europe, when racial quotas had perpetuated immigration to match
the dominant north European immigrant stock of 1920. However, by the
mid-1970s the south European backlogs were depleted and the economic reconstruction of Europe reduced further immigration from that source. By
1980, only 5 percent of legal immigration came from Europe, while Asians
(chiefly Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Indians) accounted for nearly
half. Immigration from Latin America (chiefly Mexico) constituted about 40
percent. Fueled by a family preference system, the new immigration pattern
reached record levels in the 1980s, while a surge of illegal Hispanic immigration was perceived as a loss of control over the nation’s borders.3
Writing after the First World War, the American racial theorist Lothrop
Stoddard perceived the threat of immigration in both economic terms—forcing down the level of wages—and its cultural consequences, affecting religion, rules of conduct, laws and customs. By 1940—in the middle of the Great
Restriction of immigration—Timefound it fashionable to mock Stoddard’s
fear of the “yellow peril” as a delusion. Nowadays, the same magazine predicts
the inevitable eclipse of the white, Western world.4
The 1965 legislation in
favor of source-country universalism has led to a sustained wave of Third
World immigration. Today, annual legal immigration in the United States of
about 1 million, including 100,000 refugees and 100,000 applying for political asylum, is overwhelmed by an estimated 2 to 3 million illegal entries into
the United States in every recent year. Conservative opponents of mass Third
World immigration have highlighted how such recent non-European immigration is already transforming the U.S. demography quite dramatically. One
might only consider that the proportion of southern and eastern European
immigrants, which derived from post-1870 immigration and provoked the
CONCLUSION 305Great Restriction of 1924–1965, only amounted to about 13 percent of the
total U.S. population in 1930. By comparison, the proportion of post-1970
immigrants was already over 8 percent by 1990, and rising.5
The question of whether the United States can actually assimilate such immigrants is begged by policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism in the education system. Assimilation is further undermined by the expansion of af-
firmative action, originally intended to benefit blacks as a result of civil rights
legislation, into a government-mandated discrimination against white Americans (but also blacks in practice) in favor of Third World immigrants. The ascendancy of international human rights over notions of national sovereignty
has also led to a progressive erosion of citizenship, whereby illegal aliens are
granted welfare, education, government subsidies and even voting rights.6
These issues are a matter of deep concern to conservative groups in the
United States, who see no particular reason to transform the demography of
the United States, given its wholly unforeseeable consequences. The conversion of the United States into a “colony of the world” or a “universal nation”
is without precedent in the modern world. Similar forces are at work in Europe, especially Britain, where multiculturalism is promoted by left-wing and
liberal political agendas in the quest for the electoral support of the growing
ethnic minorities. A recent report on the future of multi-ethnic Britain has
even questioned whether the national epithet “British” carries a racist taint.7
As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the far right in the United States
and Britain has gathered renewed vigor from the 1980s onwards. This trend
was initially surprising as the first generation of postwar neo-Nazi leaders was
aging and the memory of the Axis challenge to Western liberalism was fast slipping into history. However, the rise of skinhead racist gangs, white power
music, and the transformation of neo-Nazi racism into new folkish religions
of white identity clearly mirror the rising levels of immigration into Western
countries and the ensuing pressures toward multiculturalism. It is these latter
trends that prompt my comparison with völkisch German nationalist groups
in multinational Austria before the First World War. But for the rise of fascism
in the 1920s and 1930s, there would be scant interest in tracing these precursors of National Socialism. We cannot know what the future holds for Western
multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The multiracial challenges in liberal
Western states are much greater, and it is evident that affirmative action and
multiculturalism are even leading to a more diffuse hostility toward liberalism.
From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or
2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early
symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies