The Evil Genius, Part Four: Lone Wolves and Ghost Skins

I have spent a lot of hours researching and writing the past three articles about white supremacy. And readers have a right to ask "Why bother?". I'm not saying that there is much chance of these guys seizing power, or even building their numbers in the near or any future. I believe racism is on its way out. Unfortunately, however, I think that as racism becomes less influential in society it may become---in a specific, limited sense---more dangerous.  

&&&&

Lone Wolves

Part of the reason why I say this comes from my research into the influence that William Luther Pierce's novels had on white nationalism. His books were like that Biblical saying:

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.

Ecclesiastes 11:1 King James Version

What concerns me is that he did this before the World Wide Web and social media. Back then, someone had to make an effort to find a copy of The Turner Diaries. Timothy McVeigh, for example, had to find a classified advert in the back pages of Soldier of Fortune Magazine, and write to an address, sending a cheque, to buy a copy. In contrast, it took me only a few minutes at a computer to get free Ebook versions of all the texts I mentioned in my previous articles. 

Yeah, that's the Truth Social logo.

Having said that, it is the case that the major tech companies have erased a lot of the most overt white nationalism from their media systems. I have had a hard time, for example, posting examples of white nationalist propaganda on this blog because YouTube and Blogger are getting better at editing this crap out with their AI. (They are still totally worthless at making the distinction between using it for recruitment versus public education, though, hence my problems.) But all the while this has been happening, there has been significant growth in alternative social media platforms. And the worst types of racist propaganda have moved from the mainstream providers to them. For example, Donald Trump wants his followers to move to one of them---Truth Social---since he was dumped from Twitter. So purging hate from the mainstream hasn't eliminated it, it's just put it into a "walled garden" where it can fester safely away from public view.

I'm concerned about this, because social media is just about the best possible medium I can think of for engaging and cranking up "loan wolf" terrorists. And, those are the folks who are doing most of the damage.

&&&&

What is a "lone wolf" anyway? 

On the face of it, a lone wolf is someone who sets out to make a terrorist attack without being affiliated with a group. But when you think about it, there are layers to this isolation. Here are three groupings---I illustrated each with an example---that I got from an academic paper on the subject (Brian J. Phillips (2015): Deadlier in the US? On Lone Wolves, Terrorist Groups, and Attack Lethality, in Terrorism and Political Violence).

1. Someone who dreams up his motivation and then does the deed without any support from anyone else: Ted Kaczynski (the "Unabomber")
2. Someone indoctrinated and inspired by a group or movement, but then goes on to do the deed all by himself: Alek Minassian (Toronto van attack)
3. A person indoctrinated and inspired, who plans the deed and also gets the support of a small number of like-minded friends to help: Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bombing)
   

I'd suggest that guys like Ted Kaczynski are extremely rare. Not only is he a genius, but incredibly self-motivated. Luckily, people like him who decide to declare war on society are very rare. Not only because of his intelligence, but also because his extreme isolation made him very difficult to catch. Indeed, he was only caught because his brother recognized his writing style from the manifesto that he sent out to be published in the Washington Post. Had he been an only child, he might still be on the loose.

My big concern are the second and third types. Alek Minassian is a frustrated young man who is neuroatypical on the autism spectrum. As near as I can tell, he's pretty high functioning (like some of my relatives and friends), but he has had some problems dealing with people of the opposite sex. Unfortunately, he fell down the Incel rabbit hole and ended up believing all sorts of crazy things about women. The end result was a drive down the sidewalk in a rented van and the death of lots of random, innocent people.  

And, as I pointed out in previous articles, Timothy McVeigh was an intense young man with a very strong gun fetish who read The Turner Diaries and decided to take them from the realm of fiction to history. He seems to have had some trauma from his parent's divorce and PTSD from his experience in the First Gulf War. It does seem that by the end, people who knew him weren't at all surprised by what he did.

What I'm concerned about is the ability of the Web to collect 'lost souls' like Minassian and McVeigh, and nurture whatever problems they have into full-blown, dangerous paranoid fantasies about the world we live in. Cast your net wide enough, and throw enough chum in the water, and you will end up bringing up some pretty terrible monsters from the deep.

Here's an info graphic about the mental states of lone wolves from an FBI report titled A Study of Lone Offender Terrorism in the United States (1972-2015):

&&&&

From politics we have the term "useful idiot". It describes someone who is willing to support some sort of nefarious cause for idealistic reasons because they don't really understand what they are getting into. I suppose it depends on your particular beliefs about human psychology, but I would suggest that a great many naive people can get themselves talked into believing some pretty ridiculous things---and can then go on to do some pretty horrible acts. 

Please stick with me as I split a pretty thin hair---. 

Who has more moral culpability? The naive person with "issues" who gets talked into doing something pretty awful, or the person behind the scenes who winds him up like a clockwork doll? Even deeper, who's worse: the "true believer" who actually thinks turning the keys of his army of dolls is a good thing? or the cynic who knows that this is all nonsense but goes along because he thinks it serves his purpose (eg: career or party policy objectives)?

I don't generally believe in evil, or even guilt for that matter. But I do believe that some systems of thought and organizations can cause a lot of damage and it is important to work against them as much as possible. I'd like to see a world where people like Minassian and McVeigh get proper counselling and support before they commit crimes. I'd also like to see things like the Incel and Gun fetish cultures get excluded from the Web before they get out of control and damage society. I'm not talking about government censorship, but rather governments forcing Internet companies to exert editorial control in order to prevent legal liability. These are the rules that already exist for magazines and newspapers---but which have, for some reason that has never been explained to me, are not applied to anything that involves the World Wide Web.

&&&&

I'm especially concerned about this problem because one of the lessons that white nationalists have learned over the last few decades is the same thing that Islamic terrorists and other groups bent on violence have figured out. If the general public is against them, it isn't that hard for the police to infiltrate and shut them down. 

This doesn't mean the end of terrorism, though. That's because groups don't have to recruit and train people anymore. Instead, all they have to do is spread the message and add the odd suggestion about what would be the best way to achieve the best "bang for the buck". They know that if you spread the message wide enough, you will find someone who is willing to commit the violence you want. And because there is no membership list for the FBI to look at, it is almost impossible to predict when and where the next lone wolf actor will hit.

Indeed, I read an academic study on the issue of lone wolf terror attacks and it seems that while in less-developed nations (ie: with less sophisticated police forces), the worst attacks are done by organized groups, the opposite seems to be the case in First World countries. Consider the following table of figures.

Brian J. Phillips (2015): Deadlier in the US? On Lone Wolves, Terrorist Groups, and Attack Lethality, in Terrorism and Political Violence, 0:1-17, 2015.

If you remove the one event that skews the numbers (the air attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon), you can see that the number of casualties caused by lone wolf attacks in the US are between seven and eight times higher than those initiated by groups in the years between 1970 and 2010, and in 15 developed countries there is near parity. Contrast that with the result from the Global sample that includes developing nations.

If you think about Canadian examples, I'd suggest that the same phenomenon is at work. Wikipedia has a list of massacres that have occurred over Canadian history. I've removed various battles involving the First Nations, obvious random mental illness, and, organized crime. Please note, that these are just massacres, as there have been a great many other politically-motivated killings that certainly fall under the title "terrorism", but I'm just trying to identify the worst ones that have happened relatively recently. Here's the list that remains plus the casualty count and motivation:

• Ecole Polytechnique, (15 killed/14 injured), hatred of women
  
• Quebec City Mosque (6/19), Islamophobia
  
• Toronto Van Attack (11/15), hatred of women
  
• London Ontario Truck Attack (4/1), Islamophobia
  

Every single one of these was a lone wolf attack. The only recent attempt at a group attack that I can think of was the 2006 Ontario terrorism plot. Personally, I don't know what to make of that event because parts of the story seem somewhat farcical while others seem to have been legitimate cause for concern. But whether or not it was a serious conspiracy, the fact remains that it was quickly infiltrated by police and shut down.

&&&&

This has been the most disturbing series of articles that I've written for this blog. At times it's got me to question whether or not humanity is such a good idea. But I do think that the result is useful. If you think so too---and you can afford it---why not subscribe? Patreon and Pay Pal make it easy to do.

&&&&

Ghost Skins

Most Saturdays I walk to the Guelph Farmer's Market, and I often pass through the parking lot across from the Guelph Police Services building. One thing that I sometimes see that creeps me out is a giant black pickup truck with a big Canadian "thin blue line" flag held up by a hockey stick (of course) anchored on the trailer hitch. 

I'm not about to ascribe any motives to the individual who parks their truck in that parking lot on Saturdays. I have no idea who it is, and I don't even know if he is a police officer. (I think a lot of people park in that lot.) But I would like to point out that this image is completely at odds with the official doctrine of policing that has guided Commonwealth nations since the late 19th century.

Just like modern nursing---which draws much of its philosophy and ethos from Florence Nightingale---our core policing ideas come from one man, Sir Robert Peel. His "Nine Principles of Policing" are commonly held up by police departments all over the English-speaking world and I've even heard a past Chief of Police in Guelph quote from them at a breakfast meeting. Here's a video that does a good job explaining them.

First, I'd like to draw reader's attention to one part of the 7th of Peel's Nine Principles:

"the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence"

Peel's emphasis is on the idea that the police aren't distinct from the general public (ie: "the police are the public---etc"). Indeed, the only difference is that the police are paid to do full-time what all citizens are expected to be doing as citizens. 

Instead of seeing a difference between the "good" and the "bad", with the police standing in between, Peel sees everyone as being part of the public. He emphasizes this point by saying that the mark of an effective police force isn't by how many criminals it has arrested, but rather how few crimes there are in a community. 

"To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them."

I'd like to contrast the above with the following quote I found on a website explaining the significance of the thin blue line flag:

"The Thin Blue Line emblem was established to symbolize all law enforcement personnel similar to the Red Cross symbol representing all medical personnel. The Thin Blue Line embodies the unbreakable component of law enforcement standing as a safety barrier between the law-abiding citizens of America and the criminally inclined."

The thin blue line flag is profoundly different from the Peelian vision. Peel sees everyone as part of the public, whereas the thin blue line mentality makes a distinction between "the law-abiding citizens of America and the criminally inclined". 

Think about this distinction. How is a police officer supposed to actually believe that people are innocent until proved guilty if he sees himself as being part of a wall that separates "law-abiding" from "the criminally inclined"? Moreover, notice the other part of the distinction---one part are "citizens of America" as opposed to the others who we are left to assume are not real Americans?

Really apply the philosophy behind Peel's Nine Principles and you end up with the stereotype of the friendly British Bobbie who sees his job as keeping the peace and who is a friend to everyone in the community. Follow the principles of the thin blue line and you get Ferguson Missouri, where people see the cops as an occupying army who's job it is to suck as much money out of "the criminal element" (who happen to be mostly black) as it can in order to keep taxes low for real "citizens of America" (their colour, probably not of dusky hue).

&&&&

This gets me back to white nationalism. I don't think that it's much of a stretch to go from seeing "us and them" in terms of "honest citizens" versus "the criminal element" to seeing the distinction in terms of "whites" versus "non-whites". This is the point where police go from being alienated from the community to racists. 

And this is where we have to discuss "Ghost Skins".

This term originated decades ago, before the creation of the alt-right and social media, when white nationalism was dominated by the "skinheads". They took on this name because many members took on a "style" that involved shaved heads, steel-toed boots, and, suspenders.

Here's a photo from a 2009 Alberta rally of the "Aryan Front". Image from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, used under the "Fair Dealing" copyright provision.

The "ghost" part of the name involves someone not showing any overt signs of white nationalism (shaved head, tattoos, espoused beliefs, etc) so they can function undercover in mainstream society. 

In The Turner Diaries and Hunter certain elements of the plot turned around the fact that there were sympathizers to the white nationalist terrorists within the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. They helped by sharing information and by protecting racists. Let's also not forget that in times past, the KKK in the South often had members in police, government, and, political parties. 

Consider, if you will, that in at least one US city there exists two different predominately white and black police unions. Saint Louis Missouri has the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 68 and the Ethical Society of Police (wow, the difference in titles says a lot). Here's a video that explains why a group of officers went to the trouble of setting up the new organization.

As if to underline what I've been talking about, take a look at 1:20 in the above video. You'll see this frame:

I doubt Marvel approved this use.

 

Pay attention to the image at the top left of my screen grab from the video. It's an avatar that is a conflation of both the thin blue line flag and the icon of The Punisher, a Marvel "super-hero" who recently gained a high profile because of a recent two season mini-series put out by Netflixs. (My wife and I are actually big fans.) 

It's extremely troubling to see this image being used because the Punisher is not like Superman or Batman. He's a damaged ex US Marine with PTSD who has been pushed into taking the law into his own hands by combination of extreme police corruption and  incompetence. He wages a one-man war against vicious killers who work for organized crime and rogue government agencies. 

And make no mistake, it's a WAR. Unlike every other comic superhero I've ever heard of, the Punisher simply kills people---with pistols, grenades, mines, heavy machine guns, etc. He tries not to kill innocent bystanders and protects people from his enemies. But make no mistake, he's judge, jury, and, executioner all wrapped up into one angry ball of rage. In short, the Punisher is the absolutely last role model you ever want the police to emulate. 

And yet, here's Jeff Roorda, the Business Manager for the Saint Louis Police Union using the icon as his social media avatar. (I wonder if this attitude might have something to do with all the police shootings in Saint Louis?) 

&&&&

I'll tone down my anger at this point a wee bit and make a few points.

There are all sorts of subtleties involved in discrimination. People can simply draw a line between "law-abiding citizens" and "criminals" without being racist. I'll just raise but then ignore the point that a lot of white-collar criminals create a lot of misery while looking like peaceful, middle-class folks (dare I say "real American citizens"?). And that a lot of people who lead important social justice movements get viewed as "dangerous radicals". (Remember Martin Luther King was hated by many 'establishment types' before he was assassinated and his ideas edited to take out the bits where he opposed the Vietnam war and called for redistribution of wealth to end poverty. That might be why the head of the FBI had people trying to convince him to commit suicide.)

People can also discriminate against others because they are afraid of them, not because they hate them. 

If my memory serves, the first chapter of Gwynne Dyer's latest edition of the book War says that anthropology suggests that through most of humanity's existence people lived in a constant state of low-intensity warfare between different tribes. The "Other" was anyone who wasn't a member of one's own group, and generally the first instinct was to kill anyone that you didn't know---if you thought you could get away with it. And if you'd asked any of those people, they probably would have suggested that the reason why would be because if you didn't kill them first, they'd kill you. 

I'm not the sort of person who says that human beings are totally at the mercy of instincts created by evolution. Human cultural adaptation is far more important to to our behaviour. But I do think that some people---if they don't get the right type of education---are prone to projecting their fear onto people who can be easily identified as being from a different "tribe". I believe in a lot of cases this results in people who are irrationally afraid of people of colour or poor folks. 

Part of the education designed to overcome this tribalism is encapsulated in Peel's Nine Principles. You select for a certain type of police officer and train them in the idea that "the people are the police, and the police are the people". In contrast, the thin blue line teaches police that not only are there two types of people: "American citizens" and "the criminally inclined", there is in fact a third tribe, the people who make up "the thin blue line". 

If you don't see some of the people you interact with (the poor and the non-white) as being of "your tribe", it's easy to get into the mindset that they are potentially dangerous. And then you get into the warrior-cop mindset that suggests it is better to be judged by twelve members of a jury than to be carried to your grave by six pall bearers.  

&&&&

Even if a lot of bad police behaviour can be explained by irrational fear instead of out-and-out white nationalism, this fear creates a cloud that allows the white nationalist to hide behind. They get protected by the "blue wall" of silence that says that no matter what a fellow officer does, they should be protected. (Hence the Saint Louis Ethical Society of Police.) 

But beyond the people who are irrationally afraid of the Other, there do seem to be self-consciously racist police officers (and in other positions of authority too, no doubt). This is such a problem that in 2006 the FBI published a report titled White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement. Unfortunately the public version has been so heavily redacted that it's pretty much worthless as an information source.

What might be underneath this layer of secrecy can be inferred from a story I found from an Associated Press article under the by-line of Jason Dearen that was published on December 22, 2021. It describes the 10 year career of Joseph Moore who worked as an undercover agent under contract to the FBI. His job was to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in Florida. 

The FBI first asked Moore to infiltrate a klan group called the United Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK in rural north Florida in 2007. At klan gatherings, Moore noted license plate numbers and other identifying information of suspected law enforcement officers who were members.

Moore said he noted connections between the hate group and law enforcement in Florida and Georgia. He said he came across dozens of police officers, prison guards, sheriff deputies and other law enforcement officers who were involved with the klan and outlaw motorcycle clubs.

Moore says that connections between the Ku Klux Klan were extensive both in law enforcement and prisons. As part of his work, he uncovered a plot to murder a man that was being organized by several prison guards. Unfortunately, as part of the legal case that was used to protect the individual under threat, his cover was blown and he had to roll up that part of his work.

Over his decade inside, Moore said his list of other law enforcement officers tied to the klan grew. The links, he said, were commonplace in Florida and Georgia, and easier to identify once he was inside.

“I was on track to uncover more activity in law enforcement, but the immediate threat to the public with the murder plot was a priority,” Moore said. “And I was only one person. There was only so much I could do.”

Moore said the three current and former prison guards implicated in the murder plot case operated among a group of other officer-klan members at the Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler, Florida, a prison where new inmates are processed and given health checks. He said the officers he knew were actively recruiting at the prison.

The Florida Department of Corrections pushes back on Moore statement, suggesting that Moore is overstating the situation, but he sticks to his guns.

“That statement by the state is not accurate based on the facts,” said Moore, who asserts he saw evidence of a more pervasive problem than the state is publicly acknowledging. He said he gave the FBI information about other active white supremacists who were working as state prison guards and at other law enforcement agencies. He said he also provided information about klansmen applying to be state prison guards.

After testifying in the murder conspiracy case against the klansmen he’d spent years working with, Moore’s work with the FBI ended. He’d been publicly identified, and in 2018 he began life under a new name.

Dearen ends his story with a last quote from Moore about law enforcement and it's relationship to the police that apropos.

“If you want to know why people don’t trust the police, it’s because they have a relative or friend that they witness being targeted by an extremist who happens to have a badge and a gun. And I know as a fact that this has occurred. I stopped a murder plot of law enforcement officers,” said Moore.

&&&&

This is as good a point as any other to end this series of articles. It is yet one more deep dig that has left me really depressed. Next time, look for something more uplifting from The Guelph-Back-Grounder.

I know this Omicron wave sucks. But because it spreads so fast, it'll peak and decline really fast too---maybe it will on its way out by the end of January. In the interim, you know what to do.

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

The Evil Genius, Part Three: More Neo-NAZI Spirituality

In my last post on the subject of the baleful influence of William Luther Pierce on  society, I talked about Timothy McVeigh's gun fetish and introduced the idea that it makes sense to think of white nationalism more as a religious cult than a political movement. With that in mind, I discussed the first of my three streams of racist spirituality: Christian Identity. In this article, I want to talk about the other two: Odinism and Cosmotheism. Pierce is directly involved in the last of these, and indirectly in that he pioneered the use of fantasy novels to spread the message of hate.

Before I start that, however, one thing I want to point out is that there are two streams of Odinism, the white nationalist one, and, the other decidedly non-racist one. So when someone says that they follow the ancient pagan tradition of the North, don't automatically lump them in with the goofs that I'm talking about here.

&&&&

The best introduction to both Odinism and Cosmotheism that I could find was a weird novel titled Hear the Cradle Song, which was published under the name O. T. Gunnarsson. The author's name is probably false, as the only thing I could find about him was an interview on Gab where only the back of his head is shown. In it, he says that he has a profession and that he would probably lose it if people found out that he'd written this book.

The plot of Cradle Song involves various bands of white people trying to survive in a future dystopic California where centralized government has failed because of a combination of liberal idiocy and the perfidious behaviour of non-whites. 

The black population has separated itself off into their own geographic community, and the book has nothing much to say about them. The Asian community has gone through some internal power struggles that resulted in a take-over by an organized crime group has created an ethno-state titled "New China". Hispanics have similarly created "Aztlan" which is controlled by a "Generalissimo" who used to be a university professor. There are also pockets where white people still exist, the two major ones being Orange County and Hollywood. 

When the plot begins, the people of Orange County have been given an ultimatum from the leaders of New China: they have five days to leave after which they will be invaded and anyone left will be killed. With this in mind, the residents decide their only option is to go to the Hollywood enclave, which is called "White One". The problem is that the only way to get there is through Aztlan. And, as it turns out, the Hispanics kill every white they find trying to travel through their territory. 

In fact, the only survivors of this migration are a half-dozen people who get rescued by a plucky band of white nationalist guerrillas led by a charismatic figure with the name Styrbjorn Taggesson. It is through Taggesson and his band that the ideals and practice of Odinism are explained to the reader. 

&&&&

Before I get into that, I want to take a bit of a digression into literary criticism. The thing to remember about reading a novel like Cradle Song is that the author has used the "worldbuilding" technique to make the ideas he is trying to push more plausible. Racism makes sense in Cradle Song. That's because the Asians, Hispanics, and, Jews are written to conform to the stereotypes that Gunnarsson projects onto them. 

Worldbuilding is the creation of an alternative universe with it's own culture, laws,

Public domain c/o Wikimedia

scientific facts, history, etc, that allows an author to draw the reader in and "suspend their disbelief". This is how Tolkien got people to believe in hobbits, magic rings, dwarves, dragons, and so on. It's also how people watching The Wizard of Oz ended up caring about Dorothy, the Munchkins, flying monkeys, the cowardly lion, etc.

This is what makes the novel format so useful as a propaganda system for white supremacy. It means that anyone who reads the book and might have some sympathy for the message it is promoting will only have his or her predisposition intensified. (And, of course, most sensible people will never read the book in the first place.) 

&&&&

I put a lot of work into these articles, and I can use the extra money. (That's why I started the Google Ads feature again---if you were wondering.) So if you can afford it, why not subscribe? Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy to do. 

&&&&

Anyway, it is through Taggesson and his followers that the refugees from Orange County find out about Odinism. 

"What's the way he [Taggesson] follows?" Oliver asked in an over-enthused manner.

"It's the approach to life that our pre-Christian ancestors used back in pagan Europe," Saxena replied, noticing the surprise and shock in the faces of Curtis and Finley.

Hear the Cradle Song, O. T. Gunnarson, p-92

Oliver---one of the refugees---comments that he had heard that the ancient Nordic pagans practised human sacrifice. Saxena---one of Taggesson's berserkers---says that to their way of thinking this is an overly-literal misread of a key metaphor of Odinism.

"The prime message of Odin is to become, to progress into greater and greater states of existence through the use of your own will which is focused and under your conscious control. In order to become, to get to a new state of being from where are now, you have to sacrifice. There is no way around it."

"So you kill people and dedicate them to Odin in exchange for him granting you more power and a better life!" Curtis exclaimed as Finley's eyes opened wider an his stare became more pronounced.

"In a manner of speaking, yes we do. The people we kill and sacrifice for more power, knowledge, and better conditions in life are our own, individual selves," Saxena replied as he sat up and readied himself for launching into a detailed explanation. "in order to become you have to leave behind what you are now, at this instant. In other words, you have to die as what you are and then transform into something greater. A man who follows Odin does not just grow in skills and abilities and knowledge in a casual, random manner, he becomes greater and greater by using his will and consciously directing himself into new states of being. In other words, you could say that in a symbolic sense, the average person only dies now and then, and evolves into a greater condition of being but a follower of Odin will-fully kills himself, he sacrifices what he is, to develop and evolve into a condition far greater. He is always pushing forward and trying to become more powerful in any number of ways."

 Gunnarsson, pp-92-93 

For some people, this is something of a seductive message but it fails in two ways. 

First of all, there's that emphasis upon "will". Most spiritual traditions don't talk about someone "willing" to do something, instead they generally talk about submission to some sort of external authority. This can be pretty lame, as when it talks about divine revelation as defined by the ecclesiastic hierarchy. But it can also mean submission to other things, such as "the Christ within" (something like your moral intuition), the Dharma (something like a combination of cultural wisdom and moral intuition), or, even just the discovered laws of science. The point is that none of these are about starting off with a firm belief about how the universe works and forcing yourself to get better at living in tune with that preconceived notion. Instead there is generally some sort of humility about separating out what is true and false, and accepting the former and discarding the latter. There's a name for using your willpower to support your already existing beliefs: motivated reasoning---it's generally considered a bad thing. 

The second issue that pops up is a concrete, specific example of what I am talking about in the previous paragraph. I would suggest that one of the things that Saxena and Taggesson should "sacrifice to Odin" is their racism. Human beings generally progress beyond thinking people with other skin colours are subhuman by making the effort to get to know some of them. When they do, they realize all the races of people are pretty much the same. There are differences of culture, but those are accidents of geography and birth, not genetic make up. 

In a novel where worldbuilding has actually created characters who epitomize the racist caricatures that white nationalists talk about, this cognitive dissonance between what people of colour are supposed to be like, and what they really are, never arises. This is the key value of spreading propaganda through novels---which is why Pierce's efforts were so successful that others like Gunnarsson and Covington (the Christian Identity author mentioned in the last post) copied his example and wrote their own white nationalist novels.

&&&&

When Taggesson and the refugees from Orange county get to White One, things heat up pretty dramatically. That's because they are soon joined by another organization: the extremely well-trained and disciplined Aryan United Front (AUF). This organization has intelligence that says that White One is soon going to be assaulted and annexed by the Aztlan army, which plans on killing off everyone in it. 

The introduction of the AUF is another example of literary worldbuilding in the support of racist propaganda. That's because of a key problem in white nationalism---something that people like Pierce, Covington, and, Gunnarsson agree upon: a great many white supremacists are dumb as fence posts.   

While the AUF continued to quietly build its membership and develop its strategy almost totally ignored by the controlled media and government secret police, the Ku Klux Klan, Identity Christian churches, Skin Head cliques, and various other manifestations of white discontent with a multiracial society all containing crack-pots, deviants, unthinking true believers, and run-of-the-mill buffoons, were crushed and destroyed.  In the pro-white/pro-Israel and New World Order arena of conflict it was survival of the fittest, and the fittest had definitely turned out to be the AUF.

Gunnarsson, p-120

Gunnarsson doesn't try to explain how the AUF has managed to survive and thrive, he simply says that it did and out-competed all the other groups. (That's the value of worldbuilding.)

Moreover, he says that the AUF had simply given up on trying to convert outsiders to their cause.

While other organizations had been desperately working to convince the White race of its peril and responsibilities, the AUF had taken another path. After serious consideration its leadership concluded that the majority of people which comprised the White race at the time just prior to the real chaos were no better than a herd of cattle or sheep, creatures incapable of real thought and significant action or reaction. The High Command deemed the throngs of bumpkins, yokels, educated idiots, and spineless whiners and flatterers to be unreachable and worthless in any sort of action against the forces of decay in the West. The existing crowd was good for only one thing---breeding material. They could and would produce children and if those children had a safe, clean territory in which to live and grow, as well as a sound education, the West could be saved.

Gunnarsson, p-121

This again raises the question of how a group can grow to any size without doing outreach to the general public or catching the eye of counter-terrorist police agencies. Again---worldbuilding.

&&&&

However they came into being---like Taggesson's crew---the AUF are a collection of super-men who together fight like an oiled machine. And when the Odinists meet with the AUF, both groups quickly size each other up, decide that they like what they see, and join forces. Together, they quickly roll-over White One's pathetic defence force. Then they immediately pivot and annihilate Aztlan's army in a heroic battle. 

Then it's time to murder off the gays and lesbians, kill the Jewish leaders, and, exile all the mixed-race couples, people with mixed race parentage, and, the remainder of the Jews. 

Next on the dance card is indoctrinating the left-over "breeding stock". A mandatory public meeting is held and the "chairman" of the UAF starts letting the people of White One in on what the new bosses believe. 

It starts with a little push back by one of those liberal snow flakes---.

"I think anyone can dream up any interpretation about anything! And I just don't believe that the Jewish people have been deliberately working to destroy anything! Hell, I've got plenty of friends that are Jewish and they've never done anything or said anything to put them into your category of 'race destroyers' in my view!" One man had stood up and challenged the chairman on the information and accusations he had just levelled at the Jews and there was a lot of mumbling from others in the huge audience in agreement. 

"Sir, I really don't care if you believe or disbelieve what's been presented to you tonight, but I'm going to lay some absolutely rock solid facts out for you and everyone else here because I think that these facts are something that you've all been kept in the dark over ever since you were children," Ivor replied in a forceful tone and the man who had stood up and yelled his question now sat down, then the audience became silent.

Gunnarson, pp-375-376

This token opposition to indoctrination doesn't really hold much water, because the novel has shown how the local Jewish elite had manipulated and controlled the others in White One in order exploit them. When faced with immanent invasion by the Hispanics, this cabal's prepared response was to have been to release a stolen bio-weapon that would have killed every human being on the earth. (This was prevented by a series of happenstances---divine intervention by Odin, perhaps??) Yet another example of the value of worldbuilding with regard to propaganda.

&&&&

So what are these "rock solid facts" that the UAF has built it's worldview around? Here are two:

"This brings us to point number eight which is that evolutionary units, or races if you like that term, developed distinct societies and cultures. Societies are nothing more than breeding communities and, unless they possess enmity which is prejudice and aggressiveness toward non-related outsiders, and protect their offspring, the society, the breeding community, dies. Societies are not around to cater to the whims of degenerates or coddle disruptive criminal elements or provide sustenance for those competing races--they are for the safety and welfare of the children of the race that founds them.

Alright, now here's number nine, the evolutionary process causes enmity which is ferocity, competitiveness, deceit, anger and hate, to exist as a deep-felt compulsion in races toward foreign elements because such feelings keep gene pools apart as well as pure and distinct, and this enables them to proceed with their unique destinies. But the evolutionary process also causes something else in races and that is amity. Amity is friendliness, goodwill, self-sacrifice, love, and cooperation. And these feelings exist between members of a race to insure that like breeds with like and that expansion, which insures a race's survival, takes place.

Gunnarson, pp-379-380

Why does he hate other races? According to Chairman Ivor, it's simply an instinct that Darwinian evolution has built right into us. So the AUF believes that racism is a basic instinct in the human being. The Odinists believe much the same thing, but they have a more poetic way of describing it. As Styrbjorn Taggesson explains it, at birth every child is visited by one of the Norse Gods: Odin, Thor, Freyr, etc. They recite a poem (ie: the "Cradle Song" from the book's title) over the child that sets out their destiny from birth to death. The child hears it, but then forgets. Either way, people are just racist---whether it's because of what's in our DNA or it's because a god whispered it in your ear when you were a baby. We support racism because---well, because people are racist and that is that!

The thing about this explanation is that it's plausibility depends on the willingness of the reader to accept that they are inherently racist. It's a perfect prescription for accentuating a preconceived notion plus an excuse for refusing to look deeply into their beliefs to see if they should be changed. Again, it's a brilliant piece of propaganda aimed a recruiting anyone who is already prejudiced. But if you aren't predisposed to be a racist---it's not much of an argument at all. (Surprise! Surprise! Racism doesn't make any sense!)

&&&&   

This brings me back to William Luther Pierce. He specifically created his own type of racist spirituality, and it's very much like the beliefs of the AUF. The name says it all---"cosmotheism" means "universe/god". The idea is whatever the laws of the universe---such as Darwinian evolution---gives us, is God's will. 

 
Pierce was a great orator, and the clip I've posted above is just a sample of his rhetoric supported by first-rate production values. His ideas aren't useful and/or true---but I suspect they would be tremendously attractive to a naive man like Timothy McVeigh. Think about that when you watch this small segment from a much longer, three part series.

I'm willing to entertain the notion that there is something of an instinct towards tribalism in the human race. But I would posit that this is more than over-balanced by humanity's tremendous plasticity when it comes to culture. If children are predestined for anything at all, it is to learn. That's how they are able to pick up languages pretty much by osmosis. And they learn much, much, more than just that. If they are taught to be racists, then they will probably have a bit of that in them later on in life. But if the opposite is true, then racism will die out. And, I would argue the obvious decline of racism by age cohort is pretty much irrefutable evidence of this fact. Young people today are much, much less racist than their parents, grandparents, and, great grandparents. 

The best visual indicator of this decline that I could find is this graph from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the U. of Chicago. I found it cited in an article titled The Social Construction of Racism in the United States. As you can see, it shows a marked decline in the racist views of Americans about probably one of America's traditionally most volatile issues: "race mixing". 

&&&&

I'm not going to go into too much detail about why I think it's important to understand white nationalists, even though their numbers are probably in decline. That's for the next article in this series. 

But I would point out that there are some significant groups that seem to be singing from the songbooks I've mentioned above. One of the more visible anti-immigrant groups that has arisen in Canada over the last decade is the Soldiers of Odin. The group first arose in Finland but has spread across the world. 

Part of the "brand" of the group seems to be to portray themselves not as being white nationalists, but rather a "community support group" that is concerned about "illegal immigration". In Canada, it has developed some visibility through street patrols, food drives, and, needle clean-ups where IV drug users hang out. It seems to me that this is an attempt to build a disciplined organization "under the radar". This sounds somewhat like how Gunnarsson describes both the AUF and Odinism in Cradle Song.

Another example of Odinism is the Wotansvolk ("people of Odin" in German) movement that was started in 1995 and seems to have been successfully spread within US prisons through White Aryan gangs and has now moved into the outside world. (Islamist terrorists also recruit within prisons.) One of it's appeal seems to have been being associated with the "The Order", a right-wing group of terrorists who seem to have been inspired by The Turner Diaries. (Among other things, the people controlling Turner's racist revolution are a secret society called "The Order".)

Yet another element that has resonances with the ideas of NAZI Spirituality are "The Three Percenters". The group gets it's name from the belief that only three percent of Americans supported the revolution for independence. The implication being that taking over the government only requires a sufficiently-motivated tiny minority. Again this seems to be a group working from Gunnarsson's Aryan United Front playbook: keep a low profile and build the organization. They appear to have dissolved after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capital building, but I suspect that this is just a strategic move to attempt to protect the organization and its members from debilitating lawsuits.

 

Official Flag of the three percenters.

&&&&

That's enough for this article. As I write this article, I'm suffering the effects of my third dose---which I am happy to have received. Buckle down, follow the lead of our great local Health Officer, and hopefully this will be the last wave before we enter "the new normal". Try to be nice to each other, we're all a bit frazzled.

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!