Fascists Among Us Read online

  Both Italian fascism and German National Socialism recruited heavily from returned soldiers. Fascist groups appealed to veterans by attributing wartime suffering to internal enemies and by promising to root them out. But they also fetishised the experience of war itself, presenting it as constitutive of a new fascist identity.

  In 1914, in an earlier era of economic dislocation, a surprising proportion of the population had welcomed hostilities partly as an antidote to a peacetime they had experienced as stultifying and inhuman. As the historian Eric Leed explains, ‘It was commonly felt that with the declaration of war, the populations of European nations had left behind an industrial civilisation with its problems and conflicts, and were entering a sphere of action ruled by authority, discipline, comradeship, and common purpose.’21

  Peace meant atomisation, alienation, and isolation, with men and women impersonal cogs in the gears of industry. War offered meaning, excitement, and adventure. Modern society was emasculating, dominated by those that the poet Rupert Brooke called ‘half-men’, while combat restored a traditional virility.

  As Julian Grenfell, another soldier poet (and Great War casualty), put it in his poem ‘Into Battle’, ‘And he is dead who will not fight/And who dies fighting has increase.’ — lines that, typically, present war as an antidote to the bloodless tedium of everyday life.

  The conclusion of his poem reads like a hymn to the berserker state of the rage murderer:

  And when the burning moment breaks,

  And all things else are out of mind,

  And only joy of battle takes

  Him by the throat, and makes him blind …

  In Germany, nationalist intellectuals took the ecstasy that some men found in combat and gave it a particular political content, offering war almost as a foretaste of the new völkisch regime.

  ‘This war is not the end but the prelude to violence,’ declared the veteran and writer Ernst Jünger. ‘It is the forge in which the new world will be hammered into new borders and communities. New forms want to be filled with blood, and power will be wielded with a hard fist. The war is a great school, and the new man will bear our stamp … The festival is about to begin, and we are its princes.’22

  In a very different context, Person X adopted a recognisably similar project.

  Mullen used the term ‘autogenic’ to describe massacres driven by psychopathology or personal (rather than political) problems. The killings carried out by Person X were not autogenic — they were, as he says in his document, a politically motivated terrorist attack.

  But he used them to rewrite the massacre script, injecting political content into an apolitical form.

  In an important essay about 4chan, Dale Beran emphasises the centrality of competition and humiliation to the culture that grew from the site. He points out how many of the terms popularised by troll culture emphasised status (‘fail’ and ‘win’, ‘alpha’ males and ‘beta cucks’), arguing that the channers developed an entire sensibility to cloak a sense of gendered inadequacy, an inability to function beyond the computer screen.23 The description captures precisely the kind of people likely to be fascinated with the ‘burning moment’ of a rage massacre — that instant when the emasculated loser experiences godlike masculine power. That propensity was accentuated if the loser in question had been exposed to the ideas of fascism, with their emphasis on violence as redemption.

  By exploiting his core constituency’s yearning for the dominance and control they associated with gun violence, Person X sought to transform future autogenic massacres into acts of fascist terror. That was why he so consciously situated himself within a lineage of mass murders.

  As we have seen, Person X referred to Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life murderer. He enthused about the man he called ‘Knight Justiciar Breivik’. He also named other fascist or racist killers: Luca Traini, who opened fire on African migrants in Italy; Dylann Roof, who killed eight people in Charleston; Anton Lundin Pettersson, who murdered three in a school in Sweden; and Darren Osborne, who rammed his car into pedestrians near the Finsbury Park Mosque in London.

  The establishment of a tradition mattered, since tradition shaped the specific form of the rage-murder script.

  In May 2014, a 24-year-old man named Elliot Rodger went on a massacre in Isla Vista, California, eventually killing six people. In some respects, Rodger resembled the stereotype of the youthful rampage killer, an unhappy individual obsessed by his lack of social and sexual status, and consumed by fantasies of violent revenge.

  Yet Rodger belonged to an online community of ‘incels’, men who gathered on Reddit and elsewhere to discuss the elaborate, and deeply misogynistic, belief system by which they explained their ‘involuntary celibacy’. Rodger and his peers believed themselves unfairly deprived of sex by attractive women they called ‘Stacys’, who threw themselves at alpha males or ‘Chads’. Their ideas drew tacitly on far-right ideologies (in particular, in their sense of feminism as a form of social engineering) without necessarily making that commitment explicit.24

  Before Rodger took himself and his gun to the Alpha Phi sorority, he uploaded a video explaining the nature of what he dubbed the ‘Day of Retribution’. Describing himself as ‘the supreme gentleman’, he claimed he had ‘no choice but to exact revenge on the society’ that had ‘denied’ him sex.25

  ‘If we can’t solve our problems,’ he said, ‘we must DESTROY our problems … One day incels will realise their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.’26

  In the aftermath of the murders, Rodger became an object of fascination in incel forums. Members applauded his rampage, reposting his videos or image, and quoting from his manifesto. Because incel culture shared the sensibility (and even some of the members) of 4chan and 8chan, much of that enthusiasm undoubtedly came from shitposters. But internet irony ultimately made no difference, for, in April 2018, a man called Alek Minassian posted a statement on Facebook.

  ‘The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!’27 He then drove a van into female pedestrians on the streets of Toronto, killing ten and wounding many more.

  Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, responsible for nine murders in a community college in Oregon in 2015, left a note in which he praised Rodger,28 as did Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.29

  Rodger had given a particular set of troubled young men a pseudo-political rationale for their violence. Person X sought to do the same, but on a more explicitly fascist basis.

  To that end, he thought carefully about how best to inject political content into the rituals associated with massacres. He performed the generic elements of the traditional script in a deliberate and careful manner: writing a farewell, taking pictures of his arsenal, posting a document, and so on. But he gave each of them a distinctly fascist twist.

  Rather than a list of personal grievances, he created a political manifesto. Instead of simply posting photos of his guns, he uploaded images of weapons painted with slogans. Where other mass shooters recorded the moment before an attack, Person X live-streamed his killings, thus creating a ghastly record designed to circulate online.

  Yet, even as he prepared to perform the most real act imaginable — the taking of human life — he retained the ironic sensibility of the internet right. His video began with him shouting, ‘Remember lads, subscribe to PewDiePie’, thus embedding a right-wing meme among the footage of real deaths. The text on his guns invoked obscure people and events significant to fascists. (He mentioned, for instance, the Battle of Tours in 732.) But they also featured the phrase ‘Kebab Remover’, the title of a Serbian song taken up as a meme by the alt-right.

  ‘Even the massacre itself,’ noted Salvage magazine, ‘from the scrawls on the weapons to the track played by the murderer before his assault began, was conducted in such a wa
y as to induce ripples of exultation among the anons.’30

  The critique made by Anglin of fascist LARPers centred on the public perception of their street marches. On Gab, Anglin had explained how ‘watching a bunch of “Alt-Right” fat guys in costumes get shouted down in the street and laughed at … hurts the morale of our own guys … [and] takes away from things that we’ve been doing successfully in the propaganda sphere’.31

  While rejecting the online-only strategy, Person X also recognised the inability of small fascist groups to translate their online support into traditional political activism. By conducting a horrendous massacre, he found a way to present earnest fascist propaganda in ways that no one would dare laugh at.

  In his reshaping of rage murder — injecting a conscious political element into the already-existing massacre script — Person X hoped to set in motion a cascading sequence of atrocities, in which young men (on the fringes of the fascist movement or at least already vaguely sympathetic to far-right ideas), would individually decide to, as he put it, ‘stop shitposting and make a real-life effort’, with each murder inspiring murders to come. After all, according to the New York Times, ‘at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011 were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks, professed a reverence for them or showed an interest in their tactics’.32

  That was the sense in which Person X was lighting a path forward: not so much inspiring people by his ideas (though he clearly hoped to do that), but fascinating them with ‘the enticing urge to destroy’.

  He was, as Salvage argued, using ‘the language of memes to identify himself and his belonging, and to excite and win support from a growing, paradoxical entity: an online community of the lone-wolfish’.33

  It has already worked. In April 2019, a message appeared on 8chan using Person X’s name and linking to a manifesto. ‘What I’ve learned here is priceless,’ the anon wrote, and then added, ‘a livestream will begin shortly.’34 Soon, a gunman began shooting at worshippers at a synagogue in Poway, California. After he was captured, one person lay dead and several others were injured.

  In his manifesto, the alleged perpetrator explained that, ‘[Person X] was a catalyst for me personally. He showed me that it could be done. And that it needed to be done.’ By attacking a synagogue, the Poway shooter showed, once again, the connection between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

  Person X had denied an animus against Jews, in a passage that led some commentators to wonder if he in fact rejected the National Socialist preoccupation with the so-called ‘Jewish Question’. Yet Person X’s disavowal was not what it seemed.

  ‘A Jew living in Israel is no enemy of mine,’ he wrote, ‘so long as they do not seek to subvert or harm my people.’35

  The formulation was not, in fact, incompatible with fascist anti-Semitism, since Hitler had briefly contemplated the relocation of Jews in German or conquered territory into an ethno-state.36 In any case, while Person X approved of Jews living in Israel, his attitude to Jews in ‘non-Jewish’ countries could be inferred from his attitude to Muslims, whom he regarded as interlopers to be killed.

  The Poway shooter found no difficulty in making that connection. In his manifesto, the Poway killer discussed how he’d first tried to set fire to a mosque before attacking a synagogue. Both actions were, he said, attempts to cleanse the nation of ‘invaders’.

  As well as copying Person X’s argument, the Poway killer’s document mimicked his style, sprinkling memes among its arguments. Like Person X, the perpetrator live-streamed his attack (though the recording failed). Like Person X, he spoke of inspiring others to commit further murders.

  ‘Every anon reading this needs to carry out attacks,’ he said.37

  As Charlie Warzel noted in The New York Times, fascist shootings had become ‘sickeningly standardised’ to a template tailored for the internet.38

  Disturbingly, the incident showed that the audience also understood the script. The first response to the Poway killer’s post came from another user who urged him to get ‘a high score’ — by killing lots of people.39

  A few months later, in August 2019, a man opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso. He, too, wrote a document — this time, denouncing Hispanics rather than Muslims or Jews‚ and posted it on 8chan. It began, ‘In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.’

  Again, the anons cheered. ‘Things ARE accelerating,’ wrote one, ‘and attacks are happening with increasing frequency.’

  The strategy of Person X seemed to be working.

  5

  ‘FORESTS, LAKES, MOUNTAINS, AND MEADOWS’

  ECOFASCISM AND ACCELERATIONISM

  Nothing in Person X’s document has spurred as much confusion as his references to the environment and environmentalism. ‘I … consider myself an Eco-fascist by nature,’ he wrote.1

  Many conservatives used his self-description as an eco-fascist to cordon off Person X from the ideas of the right. He couldn’t be a right-winger, they said, because he’d identified himself as an environmentalist — and environmentalists belonged on the left.2

  Others suggested that his comments about climate change revealed mental confusion, evidence that his manifesto should be taken less as a coherent ideological statement and more as a grab bag of pathologies. But in the context of the ongoing strategic debate among fascists, Person X’s professed ‘environmentalism’ made perfect sense, particularly given the affinity between the far right and a certain ecological tradition.

  In many countries, environmentalism developed alongside the anti-immigration movement, with the same personnel sometimes involved in both. In the United States, for example, the lawyer Madison Grant founded the National Parks Association, the Save the Redwoods League, and the New York Zoological Society, helped establish the Denali National Park in Alaska and Everglades National Park in Florida — and wrote The Passing of the Great Race, a book that Hitler described as his bible. Grant’s interest in conservation and his interest in eugenics stemmed from a similar source: a belief that races were akin to natural species, and thus needed to be tended and preserved.3

  In her bestselling book H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald writes of seeing deer congregating on inhospitable land near where her mother lives. Another man joins her in watching the animals, and then says, ‘Doesn’t it give you hope?’

  She asks what he means.

  ‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’

  Richard Smyth, who repeats that anecdote, argues that similar attitudes manifest themselves surprisingly often within nature writing. He points out that Tarka the Otter — recently voted ‘the UK’s favourite nature book’ — was written by Henry Williamson, a Hitler supporter and member of Mosley’s British Union, whose naturalism developed in parallel to his fascism.4

  In Germany in particular, right-wing Romanticism gloried in the hierarchy of the wilderness, contrasting the natural struggle for survival with the egalitarian decadence of cities. The contemporary anti-fascist Alexander Reid Ross points out that the word ‘ecology’ was coined by Ernst Haeckel, an influential race theorist, while ‘biocentrism’ was associated with the philosopher Ludwig Klages, who blamed environmental destruction on modernity … and Jews.5

  Such ideas found their way into National Socialism and its concept of ‘Blood and Soil’, the supposed biological basis of German nationalism. Nazi theorists such as Richard Walther Darré asserted a semi-mystical link between the German peasantry and the land on which they toiled. Deracinated cosmopolitans might thrive in the metropolis, but Aryans, the Nazis claimed, could only flourish with sufficient lebensraum (living space).

  ‘There is no nationalism without environmentalism,’ writes Person X, ‘the natural environment of our lands shaped us just as we shaped it. We were born from our lands and our own culture was molded by these s
ame lands. The protection and preservation of these lands is of the same importance as the protection and preservation of our own ideals and beliefs.’6

  All of this comes straight from Nazism.

  Today, the mainstream environmental movement identifies, for the most part, with the left. Yet a small but vocal eco-fascist tendency still exists, particularly online, where it posts, as Sarah Manavis puts it, ‘a bespoke cocktail of alt-right memes, pictures of forests and cabins, hatred towards Jews, and rants about animal rights’.7

  In his manifesto, Person X rehearses similar ideas. He denounces left-wing environmentalism, and blames the destruction of nature on immigration.

  ‘The Europe of the future is not one of concrete and steel, smog and wires but a place of forests, lakes, mountains and meadows,’ he tells us.

  Once again, though, the curiously elevated language suggests a tension, with the forests, lakes, mountains, and meadows positioned rather oddly alongside an online aesthetic developed by the basement-dwelling computer nerds of 4chan and 8chan.

  The disconnect between Person X’s vision and his audience reflects the innate contradictions of fascist environmentalism. Hitler promised a mystical communion with the soil, but he delivered massive industrialisation in the construction of a war economy. The Aryan utopia that Person X lauds — those images of white mothers raising their white babies in idyllic rural settings — pertains more to JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit than the twenty-first century fascist milieu of lulz, skinheads, and shitposts.

  To understand the function of ecology within Person X’s broader program, it’s helpful to examine what he describes as his ‘tactics for victory’ — in particular, something he calls ‘accelerationism’.

  Robin MacKay and Armen Avanessian define accelerationism as ‘the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies’.8