The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right

A Special Relationship of Hate

P. Jackson, A. Shekhovtsov, P. Jackson,A. Shekhovtsov

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137396211
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since 1945 neo-Nazi and far right extremists on both sides of the Atlantic have developed rich cultures which regularly exchange ideas. Leading activists such as Colin Jordan and George Lincoln Rockwell have helped to establish what has become a complex web of marginalised extremism. This book examines the history of this milieu to the present day.

Part I

1

Accumulative Extremism: The Post-War Tradition of Anglo-American Neo-Nazi Activism

Paul Jackson

Abstract: This essay explores the development of a transnational, Anglo-American neo-Nazi culture from the end of the Second World War to the present day. It stresses that it was the unique friendship between Colin Jordan and George Lincoln Rockwell that fuelled this tradition of cooperation, and plots how their World Union of National Socialists developed a mutual understanding between British and American activists in the 1960s. This survey of an emergent, post-war ‘tradition’ of Anglo-American interaction also highlights how Holocaust denial brought together British and American activists, and the from the 1980s onwards, we see a more complex series of interchanges emerge, including Blood & Honour and Combat 18. The chapter concludes by examining how this ‘tradition’ is now reproduced by a variety of websites.

Keywords: accumulative extremism; Blood and Honour; Combat 18; neo-Nazi; World Union of National Socialists

Jackson, Paul and Anton Shekhovtsov. The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137396211.0005.

In the interwar years, fascism in both Britain and America was very much a minority pursuit. Openly Nazi copycat groups in the United States, such as the German-American Bund, were of no great significance. Meanwhile, British fascists such as Oswald Mosley were never really able to raise their impact beyond that of running a fringe, countercultural movement.¹ Since the fall of the Nazi regime, and the discrediting of fascism as a viable ideology in the eyes of the political mainstream across the world, the myriad post-war reinventions of Nazism, and other variants of fascism, have become far more limited in their political ambitions in the short term. Moreover, relatively speaking, the British and American variants have become more significant to the international milieu. With ‘cultural exports’, such as White Power music from the UK, and popular slogans, such as David Lane’s 14 Words from the United States, both British and American activists can claim to have had an impact on the wider international milieu. Moreover, if anything they have become more radicalised when compared to their interwar variants. As Roger Griffin has noted, in America since 1945, the ‘Nazification’ of its ultra-nationalist subcultures ‘has tuned parts of the country into hot-houses for overtly fascist versions of religious and secular white supremicism’.² Similarly, drawing on the legacies of fringe interwar Nazis, such as Arnold Leese, multiple generations of post-war British fascists have been radicalised via re-workings of Nazism too.³ Moreover, at least to a degree, pockets of activists within these national trends of reinvention have found a sense of transnationalism, fighting for a common cause as well.

Mapping the emergence of exchanges in such neo-Nazi ideas, and in particular drawing out how a new tradition of exchange has developed between British and American activists, is the focus of this chapter. Yet what follows does not pretend to offer a comprehensive overview of each and every point of interaction between the British and American cultures that have sought to retool Nazi ideas for the post-Hitler era. Indeed, there are already substantial volumes devoted to this topic, and the theme still remains under-documented.⁴ Instead, it focuses more targeted attention on the ways in which a new transnational tradition has been marked by ideological and tactical innovations, achieving this by examining selections of cultural production from figures that have developed at least some level of transatlantic exchange. Moreover, it seeks to map this process over a series of generations, to draw out the ways in which a new ‘tradition’ of Anglo-American collaboration has developed since 1945.

Such a concern also raises the question of why it is important to understand such new ‘traditions’ of extremism. With some regularity, the anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi activists who have forged this tradition have turned to violent extremism to develop their politics, as seen in groups such as The Order in America, and Combat 18 in the UK. Meanwhile, for those integrated into the milieu, but who do not carry out violence, their lives are nevertheless defined by an extreme culture that is often laced with messages that implicitly or explicitly license violence too.

Mapping this transnational milieu of neo-Nazi ideologues reveals a multifaceted culture too. Music, fiction, ‘historical’ philosophies, clandestine online worlds and even political faiths are all part of the countercultures that the Anglo-American neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic milieu has generated for itself. Touring through the contours of such an environment, this chapter will demonstrate the senses of compatibility, and comradeship, felt by British and American activists, and explore how figures on both sides of the Atlantic drew from each other’s activism to develop their own version of the ‘cause’. Finally, it will close by addressing the issue of internet sites that have now been able to collate this tradition into easily accessible, online resources, allowing the tradition to access a new generation.

‘Inventing’ traditions

How should we think of a ‘tradition’ in such a context? Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s classic volume, The Invention of Tradition, highlighted how the vast majority of the mass, mainstream rituals of the modern world are of relatively recent origin, though they are often presented by their adherents as phenomena stretching back into the mists of time. The rituals that developed around the British royal family around the end of the nineteenth century are a classic case in point. From the cultures of football clubs to ideas of national identity, the ‘traditions’ that mark contemporary societies can regularly be dated back only a few generations.⁵ Moreover, their analysis highlighted how such ‘invented’ traditions are regularly produced by the conditions of modernity, and are seen as significant as they help people make sense of a fast-changing world by offering stable points of reference. Yet while the traditions of interest to Hobsbawm et al. were essentially mainstream phenomena, what is under analysis here is the emergence of a tradition of cooperation within an essentially clandestine context.

To help frame analysis of a post-war neo-Nazi tradition, this chapter will call such a process of creating the critical mass of reference points to muster such a sense of tradition ‘accumulative extremism’. This term plays on Roger Eatwell’s recent work, which has powerfully developed the idea of ‘cumulative extremism’,⁶ highlighting how tit-for-tat responses between opposing ideological groupings generate a potent ‘us’ versus ‘them’ subculture. This is in some ways similar to what is being examined here. Yet the difference is that, while Eatwell, rightly, stressed the need for analysing the radicalising impact of interactions between discrete, antagonistic grouping, this chapter tries to underscore the radicalising impact that can occur through interactions between discrete and, very broadly, cognate grouping; that is, organisations that tend to see themselves as contributing to the same wider ‘cause’ (though as we will see often these ‘cognate’ groups can be quite antagonistic towards each other too!). As a consequence, individual, radical positions are given a sense of validity, and so are reinforced by their ability to fit within a wider culture that over time ‘accumulates’ various reiterations of the general ideology. As such, ‘accumulative extremism’ suggests we need to develop a quite rich description of the multiple layers that have contributed to British and American re-workings of Nazi ideology. We need not merely scrutinise the ways in which the constituent parts of this trend are important, but also attempt to consider them as possessing a sort of ‘gestalt’ quality too. This quality has been amplified in recent years, primarily as a result of the new media, which has allowed so much of this new tradition to be repackaged, and therefore re-imagined, by new sets of protagonists. Nevertheless, exactly how significant the new Internet era has been remains open for debate.

To fully study this process of ‘accumulation’, it is important to capture a sense of change over time too. This allows attention to be paid to the shifts in reinterpretation and reconfiguration of the messages within the post-war, neo-Nazi tradition, via phenomena such as intergenerational exchanges, heroisation of leaders, the creation of martyrs and new tactics and strategies for coordination and dissemination. Such longer trends can be lost in (equally important) studies that focus on single groupings, or are limited to a shorter time period. It is crucial to at least try to capture the ways in which multiple cohorts of activists have contributed to a fuzzily defined ‘cause’ over a longer stretch of time. The roles of earlier ideologues can also be seen to change as a result, as over and above their own achievements, their later, remembered legacy takes on new forms. Those who died young can ‘live on’ within the tradition, to provide crucial legitimising reference points for later generations, who are then able to set their own political actions within a longer timeframe of mutually reinforcing activism.

What are the rough parameters to this ‘cause’ when it comes to neo-Nazi cultures? Very broadly put, within many post-war, neo-Nazi settings, we regularly find some variant of a meta-narrative that claims the interwar era represented a period of great opportunity for Nazi ideals, yet these hopes were dashed when Nazism was defeated by the ‘hidden Jewish forces’. Consequently, the period from the post-war era to the present represents some form of interregnum, and a liminal time, during which the revolutionary cause needs to be kept alive by the hard-core, and to an extent promoted more widely too. Moreover, for the faithful, hope can be maintained via the idea of a new crisis providing fresh opportunities for a re-cast set of Nazi-inspired ideals to succeed where Hitler had failed. So the belief stresses that the future will eventually see a victory for the Nazi revolution. From such a meta-narrative, we can see that Roger Griffin’s stress on palingenesis, or mythical, revolutionary qualities within fascist ideology is central to such political myth-making.⁷ Moreover, Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke also stresses the deeply mythic qualities that figures within such neo-Nazi cultures can steep themselves in, such as rituals, political faiths, initiations and, as the meta-narrative just summarised suggests, millennial expectations too.⁸ These are all crucial aspects of the tradition, as it has emerged.

The transnational ‘tradition’ of Anglo-American activism, constructed through ‘accumulative extremism’, that is being surveyed here is a phenomenon that has a value for activists as it adds a further, enriching layer to the potential activism of protagonists it offers a wider set of comrades to feel allegiance with. It does not form an alternate to the national r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I
• Part II
• 3  Jim Crow and Union Jack: Southern Segregationists and the British Far Right
• 4  Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right
• 5  The Tea Party Movement at the Crossroads of Nation and State
• 6  The German National Socialist Underground (NSU) and Anglo-American Networks: The Internationalisation of Far-Right Terror
• Conclusions: Suggestions for Future Exploration of Transnational Fascism
• Selected Bibliography
• Index