Fascists Among Us Read online

  Accelerationism grew from various left-wing sources: Marx’s appreciation, in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, of the dynamism of the market; certain passages from Lenin suggesting that revolutionaries should ‘support, accelerate, facilitate’ the development of social contradictions; and the poststructuralist enthusiasm of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard for the libidinal energy of late capitalism.

  But most accounts of the movement focus, in particular, on the British philosopher Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit that he headed in Warwick University for a brief period in the mid-nineties. Rejecting what they saw as the miserablism of the contemporary left, Land argued that the only way to escape the logic of capitalism was, as Benjamin Noys says, to ‘take it further, to follow its lines of flight or deterritorialisation, to speed-up beyond the limits of production and so to rupture the limit of capital itself’.9

  The CCRU duly gloried in electronic music, the novels of William Gibson and HP Lovecraft, automation, technology, amphetamines, and the imminent destruction of liberal-humanist norms. Eventually, Land suffered a mental collapse (‘his work increasingly defied comprehension, sometimes departing from language altogether in favor of invented alphabets and number systems’), fled academia, and then moved to China, where his writing became authoritarian and explicitly racist.

  Over time, ‘accelerationism’ found a new audience as part of the so-called Dark Enlightenment, a gaggle of writers combining Silicon Valley libertarianism with corporatism. They saw the economic and political tendencies that particularly worried liberals (such as the dysfunctionality of parliamentary democracy, the influence of multinationals, and the growing dominance of AI and high technology) as seeds to be nourished — embryonic of a new, anti-egalitarian order.

  Matthew N. Lyons argues that Person X’s manifesto owes less to Land than to discussions about terrorism on the neo-Nazi forum ‘Iron March’ and, in particular, in William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, a book that lays out a blueprint for a fascist revolution through terrorism.10

  Certainly, Person X’s embrace of accelerationism means, above all, an advocacy of social and political breakdown as both necessary and desirable. Stability and comfort constitute, he says, major obstacles to the fascist revolution, which can only arise from ‘the great crucible of crisis’. As a result, fascists ‘must destabilize and discomfort society where ever possible’. Even someone pushing for minimal changes with which fascists might agree should be considered ‘useless or even damaging’: far better, Person X says, to have ‘radical, violent change regardless of its origins’.

  To this end, he advocates ‘actions such as voting for political candidates that radically change or challenge entrenched systems, radicalising public discourse by both supporting, attacking, vilifying, radicalising and exaggerating all societal conflicts and attacking or even assassinating weak or less radical leaders/influencers on either side of social conflicts’.11

  Yet, if Person X draws on Pierce, his argument also recalls another common source of accelerationist thought: the poet and fascist theorist Filippo Marinetti.

  In his Futurist Manifesto of 1909, Marinetti declared speed ‘a new form of beauty’, one that should be celebrated like the machine age that birthed it. His love of technology was accompanied by a distinctively fascist glorification of ‘aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride the mortal leap, the punch and the slap’.12

  For Marinetti, the exemplary form of ‘aggressive action’ was, of course, war:

  War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.13

  His enthusiasm for violence contains more than a whiff of the rage-killer’s exultation — the same sensual satisfaction in destruction, the same idealisation of the power inherent in slaughter. Just as the autogenic gunman often ended his rampage by shooting himself, the annihilation Marinetti celebrated was also a self-annihilation. As Walter Benjamin famously noted, the Futurist enjoyment of war amounted to an alienated humanity experiencing ‘its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’.14

  Noys makes the same point about accelerationism in the 1990s: it seemed attractive because it turned the seeming inevitability of capitalism into something desirable, even liberating. Defeat became victory — a victory ‘registered in the form of ecstatic suffering’.

  The argument provides the basis for a deeper understanding of Person X’s eco-fascism. On the surface, his accelerationism contradicts his environmentalism.

  ‘Hurrah! No more contact with the vile earth!’ shouted Marinetti. The slogan does not seem much of a basis for a concern about ecology.

  Yet right-wing trends within environmentalism invariably draw upon the ideas of the English parson Thomas Malthus. In 1798, Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he identified a supposed tendency for the (exponential) growth of human fertility to outstrip the (linear) growth of subsistence.

  Malthus himself was primarily an opponent of the poor laws, penning his tract to decry early schemes for the provision of welfare, which, he claimed, would merely encourage the destitute to breed. His ideas were, however, taken up by many ecologists, who associated the destruction of wilderness with the growth of the human population.

  But any political campaign against overpopulation inevitably raised the question as to which particular people constituted the problem — and that was something for which fascists always had an answer.

  Sarah Manavis explains it:

  [A] Malthusian take on the impact of population growth underpins almost the entirety of eco-fascism. Many eco-fascists are also eugenicists, who believe that a culling of the population, and specific races within that population, is the only way to ensure that the planet survives. While not all eco-fascists go as far as supporting mass murder, most hold that immigration has caused overpopulation in their countries and insists that the only solution is to deport those they deem non-indigenous.15

  This is precisely the perspective of Person X. He denounces ‘the left’ for both ‘controlling all discussion regarding environmental preservation’ and for ‘presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization’.

  He then explains, with horrific bluntness, the fascist ‘solution’ to the environmental crisis: ‘Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.’16 Person X’s environmentalism centres less on preservation than on destruction.

  In theory, eco-fascism celebrates ‘forests, lakes, mountains, and meadows’; in practice, it demands the murder of leftists and ethnic minorities.

  If his manifesto leaves the goals of eco-fascism hazy and amorphous, it presents its strategic imperatives with a brutal clarity. Person X enthuses about a future of Aryan villages nestled in the wilderness — but right now, he wants to kill and destroy.

  For progressives, environmentalism means slowing down or stopping climate change. Person X presents a quite different perspective. For him, global warming constitutes a problem for which it is itself the answer, bringing about the destabilisation he wants. He welcomes catastrophic social breakdown: that is what his accelerationism means.

  The writer Umair Haque has noted the compatibility between climate denialism and contemporary fascism.

  [C]atastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists, it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? … [C]limate change accords perfectly with the fo
undational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish.17

  Paradoxically, the same argument explains Person X’s eco-fascism, a doctrine in which fascism dominates ecology. ‘Why focus on immigration and birth rates when climate change is such a huge issue?’ Person X asks himself. He answers. ‘Because they are the same issue, the environment is being destroyed by over population.’18

  In other words, climate change justifies doing nothing about climate change, since, for Person X, it’s always and only the birth rates that matter. Or, more exactly, climate change justifies mass murder and ethnic cleansing as the only ‘solutions’ to the environmental emergency.

  Person X’s ‘environmentalism’ doesn’t represent a moderation of his platform. It is part of his accelerationism, the basis for an intensification of fascist violence. Fascists, he says, ‘must destabilize and discomfort society’ — and what destabilises and discomforts society more than climate change?

  The result is a position paradoxically compatible with the era, given that it welcomes ‘the great crucible of crisis’. As industrial civilisation hurtles down the tracks of catastrophic ecological breakdown, mainstream environmentalists pull weakly on the emergency break. Person X, however, calls for more speed to the engine.

  ‘Do not fear change,’ he advises his followers, ‘we are change.’19

  Once again, the slogan recalls the proto-Nazi Freikorps and their cry, ‘We ourselves are the War.’

  That comparison should give us pause. Person X presents a systematised manifesto calling for racist terror in the name of a social disruption he thinks will culminate in ethnic cleansing and genocide.

  It’s an evil program, the wickedness of which is not diminished by its self-evident impossibility. But impossible programs still attract followers, irrespective of their wickedness. The permanent combat sought by the Freikorps wasn’t, in any conventional sense, achievable — but that didn’t prevent the first supporters of Adolf Hitler from devoting themselves to it.

  6

  ‘COBBERS’

  AUSTRALIA AND THE FASCIST MILIEU

  Person X’s interactions with the Australian fascist movement provide a context for assessing the threat his project poses. Though he made contact with — and donated to — fascist groups around the world, he saw the relatively small movement in his native Australia as particularly important. On social media, he used as his avatar the ‘Aussie shitposter meme’, an image popularised by a group of Australian alt-right podcasters known as the ‘Dingoes’. Before he embarked on his murder spree, he thanked his associates on 8chan, using the archaic Australianism ‘cobbers’.1

  He participated regularly in debates on the (now deleted) Facebook pages of the United Patriots Front and the True Blue Crew, two tiny Australian fascist groups. That was why the UPF activist Tom Sewell acknowledged that Person X had ‘been on the scene for a while’.2

  The events of 9/11 altered the terrain for far-right politics in Australia particularly sharply, since they took place only a few weeks after the arrival of the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa.

  The Tampa carried a cargo of 433 refugees — members of the Afghan Hazara minority, rescued from a sinking fishing boat — and its presence in Australian waters only two months out from an election provided a key talking point for John Howard and his unpopular conservative government, a message that quickly became entwined with 9/11. Two days after the attacks on New York, defence minister Peter Reith was warning that refugee boats could ‘be a pipeline for terrorists to come in and use your country as a staging post for terrorist activities’.3 Howard duly staged a remarkable comeback.

  The Islamophobia arising from the Australian commitment to the Afghan and Iraq invasions (and the War on Terror more generally) fused with anti-refugee sentiment, as the major parties competed to ‘stop the boats’.

  Again, the post-9/11 racial discourse eventually facilitated the rise of an outsider anti-elitism, exemplified by the return of Pauline Hanson. Hanson had come to prominence in the mid-nineties by injecting traditional racist themes into public life, particularly the threat of a supposed ‘Asian invasion’, before her One Nation party collapsed acrimoniously in the 2000s.

  In the 1990s, Hanson had never mentioned Islam. In 2015, she transitioned from old-fashioned racism to the more modern kind. She returned to politics proposing a ban on ‘Muslim immigration’ and on the construction of mosques, and calling for a royal commission into Islam. On that basis, One Nation won four Senate seats.

  During her comeback ‘Fed Up’ tour, Pauline Hanson spoke at an anti-Islam rally in Rockhampton hosted by Reclaim Australia, an organisation reminiscent of European Islamophobic groups such as Pegida. Reclaim Australia presented itself as ordinary ‘mums and dads’ organising on Facebook to express their outrage about terrorism, particularly the Lindt café terrorist siege (in which a lone gunman, Man Haron Monis, had held hostage ten customers and murdered two of them).4

  Even though RA was, like Hanson herself, right-wing populist rather than fascist, fascist activists played a role in the marches it organised throughout 2015.5

  In May, a Cooma-based sanitation worker, Shermon Burgess, denounced other Reclaim Australia activists as ‘traitors’ and declared the need for a new group. Burgess had previously been associated with the fascist grouplet the Australian Defence League.6 As singer and songwriter in the band Eureka Brigade, he’d presented his politics unambiguously, celebrating the 2005 race riots at Cronulla in New South Wales as ‘Australia’s Muslim Holocaust’.7

  Since then, he had built a sizeable presence on Facebook and YouTube as ‘The Great Aussie Patriot’. He used that profile to launch the United Patriots Front, in alliance with a small coterie of activists from the fascist right, as well as (briefly) the religious Islamophobes of the Catch The Fire Ministries/Rise Up Australia Party. 8

  One of the UPF’s prominent members was Neil Erikson, a man with a long history on the far right — he later told a journalist he’d become a neo-Nazi at the age of 16.9 In 2015, he had pleaded guilty to stalking a Melbourne rabbi. ‘Give me the money, Jew, or else I will get you,’ he had said to Rabbi Dovid Gutnick, abusing him for his religion over multiple phone calls.10

  Like Burgess, Erikson regularly delivered YouTube lectures, posting them on the multiple Facebook pages he hosted.

  Burgess’s other key recruit, the Melbourne-based carpenter and amateur bodybuilder Blair Cottrell, was more ideological. An avowed Hitlerite, Cottrell believed every school classroom should feature a picture of the Nazi leader.11 In the early phases of the UPF, Cottrell contributed on-camera lectures in fascist theory he called ‘Philosophical Re-education’, clips in which he railed against ‘diversity’, ‘egalitarianism’, and similar notions.12

  Like Person X, the UPF decided pragmatically to promote Islamophobia. In one private Facebook conversation screenshotted by the anti-fascist activist Andy Fleming, Erikson chatted with Cottrell about how to balance various bigotries.

  ‘My personal opinion is stick to the Muslim shit and Cultural Marxism for max support,’ Erikson said. ‘[D]o Jews later you don’t need to show your full hand.’

  Cottrell concurred: ‘Yeah good advice and that’s my current attitude as well. It will take years to prepare for the Jewish problem. If any of us came out with it now we would be slaughtered by public opinion.’13

  Yet, despite courting the mainstream, the main UPF leaders barely disguised their commitment to the violence so central to fascism. At various times, both Erikson and Cottrell celebrated the eradication of those they deemed enemies.

  In 2007, a fascist named Josué Estébanez stabbed Carlos Palomino, a 16-year-old anti-racist activist, on a Madrid train carriage. The crime was captured on video — and so Estébanez became a cult figure for the fascist right. (Symptomatically, Person X inscribed the name ‘Estébanez’ on one of the rifles
he used in Christchurch.)14

  In July 2015, Neil Erikson posted footage of Palomino’s murder to advertise a UPF rally. Narrating the action, he described the attack as ‘gold’ and ‘bloody awesome’ — and then exulted in the passengers’ fear.

  ‘Look they’re like ants running away from one patriot,’ he said. ‘We have the power. There he is by himself, he won the battle. One patriot versus a thousand left wing unwashed scum. Bring on July 18, Melbourne, Parliament House, 1pm.’

  Erikson later told journalists his video had been ‘doctored’, though he produced no evidence for his claim.15

  Then, after the murder of Heather Heyer during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Erikson posted the mugshot of Heyer’s killer, framing the image with smiling emojis with love hearts for eyes.16

  As for Cottrell, he explained on social media how anti-fascists would be ‘executed post revolution or sent to labour camps, along with all the liberal leaders’.17

  ‘If I am ever in the appropriate position of power,’ he tweeted, on another occasion, ‘I will deport the enemies of my country and execute those who refuse to go. Laugh if you want but when the time comes I will campaign with that as my slogan, and I will win.’18

  The internet proved a tremendously important resource for the far right in Australia, not least because it allowed activists to relate to developments overseas.

  The Dingoes, the group from whom Person X borrowed his avatar, began producing a podcast called The Convict Report in 2016. It was hosted by the Right Stuff media hub, alongside the fascist Daily Shoah podcast of Mike Enoch (whom the Dingoes sought to bring to Australia).19 When the Dingoes launched their online presence, they described themselves as ‘#AltRight, but not in the way that violates #Rule1’ — a reference to the rules of 4chan.20

  Despite adorning their website with the Nazi ‘88’ symbol, the Dingoes convinced Federal MP George Christensen and former Labor leader Mark Latham to appear on their podcast.21