by Jeff Sparrow
FASCISTS AMONG US
Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award–winning writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a regular column for The Guardian, and contributes to many other Australian and international publications. Jeff is a former member of the 3RRR Breakfasters team, and is a past editor of the Australian literary journal Overland. He is the author of a number of books, including Money Shot: a journey into porn and censorship, No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson, and Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right.
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First published by Scribe in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand 2019
Published by Scribe in North America 2020
Copyright © Jeff Sparrow 2019
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
Chapter Four draws on arguments originally made in Jeff Sparrow, ‘“When the Burning Moment Breaks”: gun control and rage massacres’, Overland Literary Journal, August 2012.
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For Steph
Contents
Introduction: the need to understand
1 ‘An actual fascist’: fascisms old and new
2 ‘Sweep it all up!’: the world after 9/11
3 ‘Hail Trump!’: fascist memes
4 ‘Screw your optics!’: the Christchurch strategy
5 ‘Forests, lakes, mountains, and meadows’: ecofascism and accelerationism
6 ‘Cobbers’: Australia and the fascist milieu
Conclusion: hope against hate
Acknowledgements
Notes
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
–Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce
INTRODUCTION
THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND
On 14 March 2019, a new post appeared on the 8chan politics board /pol/. ‘Well lads,’ it read, ‘it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out and [sic] attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via Facebook.’1
The post linked to the Facebook page of a 28-year-old Australian man and a 74-page manifesto entitled ‘The Great Replacement’.
‘[P]lease do your part by spreading my message, making memes and shitposting as you usually do,’ it continued.
At 1.40 pm the next day, a man arrived at the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers.
A worshipper greeted him with, ‘Hello, brother’ — and the stranger opened fire.
He shot worshippers indiscriminately inside the building, returned to his car for more ammunition, and then came back and shot more people. After about six minutes, he drove to the Linwood Islamic Centre and killed people there. One of the men at prayer wrestled with him, and he fled.
At 2.20 pm, police rammed the gunman’s car, pulled him from the vehicle, and placed him under arrest.2 Fifty people were dead — and another died later from wounds.
In her widely praised response to the massacre, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pledged never to utter the name of the alleged shooter. The people killed that day — and the scores more left physically or mentally scarred — deserved remembrance, she said, and the man who opened fire on them did not.
In an ideal world, the conversation about the mosque shootings would have begun and ended with Ansi Alibava, who came to New Zealand with her husband to start a new life; with Husna Ahmed, who led women out of the building and then was killed when she returned to save her wheelchair-bound husband, Farid; with Haji-Daoud Nabi, who jumped into the firing line to cover friends; with Sayyad Milne, the 14-year-old slain before he could fulfil his dream of playing professional football; and with the many, many others murdered as they worshipped.3
Unfortunately, the bullets that took their lives didn’t come out of nowhere.
Recent statistics show right-wing violence on the rise. The Center for International and Strategic Studies reports that terror attacks from far-right perpetrators doubled between 2016 and 2017 in the United States, and grew by 43 per cent in Europe in that same period.4 Between 2009 and 2018, according to the Anti-Defamation League, extremists from the right caused 73 per cent of US domestic terror deaths, compared to 23 per cent of deaths attributed to Islamists and 3 per cent to left-wing terrorists.5
The only reason rightists didn’t have a monopoly over the fifty deaths from domestic terrorism in 2018 was that one attacker abandoned white supremacism for radical Islamism prior to committing murder.
The alleged perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre might have entered the mosques by himself but, politically, he was never alone. We know that, after growing up in the regional town of Grafton in New South Wales, the accused man used inherited money to travel through Europe — and on those trips he interacted with far-right organisations in many different countries.
We also know that he was deeply invested in the Australian fascist movement. On a secret blog frequented by activists from the far right, Tom Sewell, a leading fascist activist, acknowledged that the alleged perpetrator ‘had been around’ the so-called patriot movement since before 2016.
‘He was well known,’ Sewell explained to his co-thinkers, ‘for those in the know.’6 A future mass murderer was ‘well known’ to other fascists — and none of them did anything to stop him. While Sewell and other activists distanced themselves from the massacre, some posters on platforms such as 8chan and Gab openly applauded the violence — and others called for more killings.
That’s why we must understand the alleged perpetrator’s ideas, however repellent they are.
I’ve chosen to refer to the accused killer as Person X. In part, that’s because early readers reacted so strongly to the use of his name, suggesting — on the grounds that Jacinda Ardern articulated — that it diminished his victims. Certainly, many will find a discussion about the hateful doctrines that inspired Person X difficult. It would be wrong to make that process more painful.
In any case, the euphemism serves another purpose, emphasising a key argument of this book. The Christchurch gunman emerged from a fascist subculture in which he’d previously been a minor and anonymous figure. Before he stepped into the limelight to shoot innocent people, no one — outside the milieu of the far right — knew who he was.
The next killer will be the same.
The massacre at the Christchurch mosques was an act of terror, consciously designed, in ways many commentators haven’t understood, to inspir
e further acts of terror. It represented a particular strategic choice for the fascist movement, a decision not to build public organisations but to encourage violence by previously unknown individuals acting in isolation.
Already, Christchurch has inspired imitations in San Diego and El Paso. Almost certainly, there will be others. But we have no way of knowing who will carry them out.
Hence, Person X: the anonymous young man who emerges from the shadows, gun in hand, already committed to an evil ideology.
The fascism of the 1930s revolved around names that were publicly shouted — most obviously, Hitler and Mussolini. Likewise, today, the alt-right has spawned a new breed of celebrity, with racist and nationalistic demagogues building profiles through social and conventional media.
The Person X phenomenon represents something else: a strategy for fascist terrorism, one that seeks to incite angry young men to conduct rage massacres, not to achieve any specific ends so much as to destabilise liberal democracies. This plan will not bring fascism to power. It will, however, result in more deaths.
The use of a pseudonym reminds us that, while Person X might be in jail in New Zealand, he’s also out there in the world somewhere, browsing a racist internet forum and counting ammunition.
There is, however, an obvious risk in not using the alleged perpetrator’s name.
In JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the characters refer to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, in a vain attempt to ward off the evil Dark Lord. Their refusal to acknowledge Voldemort merely leaves them ill prepared to meet the threat he poses.
Since the Christchurch murders, some commentators have argued that we should refuse to discuss the ideas that motivated the massacre. In particular, politicians have advised against reading Person X’s manifesto. In New Zealand, authorities have made possession or distribution of the tract a crime, with many reputable internet service providers deleting it from their servers.
While no doubt well intentioned, such efforts won’t prevent Person X’s manifesto from circulating among the readers for whom it was intended. As we will see, the document was never particularly directed to the public. It was, first and foremost, an intervention into a specific fascist subculture — and it remains easily accessible on the platforms where right-wing extremists congregate.
In that sense, it’s already being studied by the Person Xs of the future. That’s why we need to understand it, too.
While I do not name Person X in this book, I do take his ideas seriously. In particular, I look at his self-identification as a ‘fascist’ in the context of the history and practice of fascism from the twentieth century through to now. In the twenty-first century, the terrain on which fascism operated changed dramatically, with anti-Muslim prejudice providing a politically acceptable alternative to anti-Semitism, and with the internet facilitating a new organisational paradigm.
At the same time, the Christchurch massacre emerged from the inability of fascists to translate online propaganda into real-world organisation; frustrated by the failure of fascist party-building, Person X turned to terror, seeking to politicise the rage massacres that already fascinated a certain kind of young man.
By understanding Person X’s commitment to ‘accelerationism’, a project that aims to intensify social contradictions to breaking point, we can see how it informed his so-called ecofascism: a version of environmentalism that exults in the destruction it claims to oppose. And by looking at the Australian fascist groups with which Person X interacted, we can better know the audience for his message.
Fascism remains a marginal force in the English-speaking world. It is, however, a doctrine that feeds on despair — and this is an era in which political despair abounds.
With his murders, Person X sought to forge a path for other fascists to follow. We need to understand him, because we must stop him.
1
‘AN ACTUAL FASCIST’
FASCISMS OLD AND NEW
Person X spent considerable effort spelling out his motivations in ‘The Great Replacement’, the document to which he linked in his final 8chan post.
In the first section, ‘Answering possible questions’, he provides a kind of FAQ about his ideas. In the second, he writes short responses to specific constituencies (conservatives, liberals, Christians, etc.) before a third section consisting of ‘general thoughts and strategies’. The document also contains poetry and images.
In those 74 pages, Person X makes his philosophy entirely clear.
‘Are you a fascist?’ he asks himself rhetorically.
‘Yes,’ he says in response. ‘For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist.’ He then adds, ‘I am sure the journalists will love that.’1
As it happened, journalists have, by and large, resisted applying the label to Person X, more often describing him as an ‘extremist’ or simply a ‘gunman’.
Perhaps understandably, many prefer psychological explanations for Person X’s actions. They depict him as deranged, and declare that no one could take his writings and political ideas seriously. It is, after all, more comforting to think of a mass murderer as unhinged than as calculating and lucid.
Obviously, anyone who can shoot down innocent men, women, and children while they’re praying inhabits a different ethical universe from the rest of us. In that sense, almost by definition, Person X can be judged abnormal.
But that is a moral rather than medical diagnosis. In purely clinical terms, some of the world’s worst monsters have been both supremely evil and entirely rational. Few serious historians consider Hitler insane.2
We will, no doubt, learn more about Person X’s psyche. But, if we leave aside a natural revulsion at his deeds, his document doesn’t, despite what many journalists have said, read like the ravings of a madman. Person X might not have had much formal education, but his manifesto expresses — with stark clarity — a distinctive political program.
In the classic British comedy The Young Ones, the character Rick — a parody of a gormless leftist — deploys the word ‘fascist’ against any authority figure, describing as ‘fascist’ all politicians, social workers, and critics of his poetry. The American attorney Mike Godwin has noted a similar phenomenon on the internet. His ‘Godwin’s Law’ holds that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one’.3
That’s why some analysts claim fascism should only be employed to describe a political phenomenon from the distant past. For them, ‘Fascism’ (with a capital f) refers only to the political tendency that arose in Italy in the 1920s, with the lowercase ‘fascism’ applying also to German National Socialism. Because both movements came to an end with the Allied victory in the Second World War, attaching the same label to an isolated individual in the very different circumstances of the twenty-first century can only be anachronistic and absurd.
Person X makes precisely that point. He poses the question of whether he might be described as a ‘Nazi’, and answers in the negative.
‘Actual [N]azis do not exist,’ he says. ‘They haven’t been a political or social force anywhere in the world for more than 60 years.’
But if that is true, it’s only true in the narrowest sense. ‘National socialism’ might have died in a Berlin bunker, but the development throughout the 1920s and the 1930s of parties recognisably similar to the Italian fascists and the German National Socialists (the Falange in Spain, the Ustashe in Croatia, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, and many others) implies a ‘generic fascism’ — a broader but still meaningful category for a distinctive far-right politics of which Hitler was merely one exponent.
Undeniably, delineating that category poses real problems. In a widely cited definition, the scholar Roger Griffin summarises fascism as a ‘palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’.4 If we leave aside palingenesis (that is, mythological rebirth), the nationalism of fascism means
its adherents adopted traditions, ideals, and cultures specific to particular countries. In the 1930s, some fascists declared themselves Christians, some embraced paganism or mysticism, and some remained indifferent or hostile to religion. Umberto Eco thus describes fascism as ‘a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions’.5
Furthermore, fascist movements typically changed as they developed. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party began as one of many tiny völkisch groups recruiting war veterans with an anti-Semitic nationalism. It transformed itself, in conditions of economic and political instability, into a powerful street-fighting movement of the downwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie, and then, after significant internal ructions, came to power with the backing of German heavy industry.
Fascism should, in other words, be understood as process rather than a thing, with its mutability over time making static definitions innately difficult. Nonetheless, some generalisations arise from the period of ‘classic fascism’.
Fascism was, at heart, a reactionary movement. In a context of deep economic crisis, fascists valorised hierarchy, the supposedly eternal differences between individuals, between men and women, and between ethnic groups.
‘There is no one person equal to any other, not identical twins, not countrymen, not workers within a class group and certainly not those of differing races …’ writes Person X, breaking into capitals to emphasise the point. ‘DIVERSITY IS UNEQUAL, HIERARCHIES ARE CERTAIN.’
The fascists of the 1930s organised to defeat, and ultimately to physically eliminate, those who advocated or embodied social equality: the labour movement, socialists, social democrats, immigrants, and other ‘traitors’.
In their staunch opposition to equality, egalitarianism, and popular democracy — and their support for militarism, nationalism, and traditional gender roles — fascists belonged unequivocally to the political right. Upon achieving power, fascist movements lost much of their specificity, establishing repressive regimes not so dissimilar to authoritarian states arising from different processes. Person X’s description of China as having ‘the closest political and social values to my own’ makes sense in that light. He does not admire the peasant revolt that brought modern China into existence so much as the modern Chinese state: authoritarian, repressive, and nationalistic.
