Reading Talia Lavin’s fantastic 2020 book Culture Warlords, I was struck by one pervasive thought: I’ve met these people.
Ms Lavin’s incisive book lines up some of the ripest targets
going and rightfully eviscerates them. Her barely contained – but righteously
earned – rage nearly slips out onto the page on several occasions, but the
image she creates does not descend into caricature. I know this, because I’ve
met the people she writes about.
The people I’m referring to are ardent white supremacists,
craven shills of the so-called “alt-right”, and the various adherents of their
hidden spheres of hatred. I have met them online, in countless iterations; from
the aggressively lame “incels” to pseudo-intellectual skinheads to the
political aspirant and the “silent majority” and all their ill-conceived
notions of conservative libertarianism mixed with itinerant jingoism and marred
by the failings of their own meritocracy.
The people I’m referring to are also my neighbours, my schoolmates,
my distant family, my customers in all of my shitty customer-service jobs, my
random run-ins at concerts and bars, and friends of friends of friends. I have
met them everywhere I have met people.
Here in Australia there is a parochial racism that persists through
generations of white Australians that has traditionally made it harder to
identify the *really bad* racists. This is, of course, an insulting and dangerous
idea; that there is such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ racism. But it inures us to
the racism of our forebears enough for it to perpetuate quietly, generation for
generation. However, since in particular the divisive politicking of John
Howard and Peter Costello in the late 90s – and especially their “Real
Australian” rhetoric at a time of record immigration – it is getting harder to
distinguish between nascent prejudice and policy.
As such, a Grey Army of older voters – those who effectively
own the majority of assets – and sensible fiscal-conservatives continue to vote
in numbers that outweigh any possibility of a socially-progressive youth vote.
Thanks to political fearmongering and the inherent economic self-interest that
many older Australians vote with (alongside some of their children for complex family/political-legacy
reasons that we do not have time to explore here), racial politics have been
historically tied with economic politics and a broad-reaching fear of change under
the shadow of Baby-Boomer growth. This is the socio-economic environment that
led regional Australians to support racist idealogues like Pauline Hanson and
her attempts at renewing a “White Australia Policy””.
The political validation of racist Australians began with a guarded
sense that they were finally being represented. That has morphed over the 23
years since the party’s inception to a sense that they are entitled to representation
of even their most pointedly racist and jingoistic ideals. This has led to a
kind of rebound oeuvre of disenfranchisement that has bred a more resentful,
subversive form of the racism than it was borne from.
The lonely-hearts club that is the Incel movement is a
particularly pernicious version of this almost-hidden culture of subversive
racism and entitlement. The reason they persist in the popular underground is
that their plight, and even some of the less psychotic rhetoric, is relatable
to people of sufficient depressive tendencies or social misfortune. Not
admirable, certainly, but it speaks to the predictable loneliness of many – indeed
if not most – young men. There are few men in the formative years of their
sexual-social lives that do not experience some sense of despairing loneliness,
and decades of changing gender politics have made an unstable platform for many
young men to understand and find equilibrium with that.
The divide between relatable life-experience and dangerous
ideology is nebulous to an outsider, but a quick glance at the materials
available to curious spirits is enough to send chills down the spine and soon
that environment of quiet radicalisation begins to make sense. There is an ideological
line in the sand. An initiate is coaxed towards it slowly with a sense of
brotherhood and understanding, and over that line is a war-party waiting for him
to join. They are finding a sense of community, or more accurately of society.
They are creating a language all their own. They are creating religious
ideations and death rituals. And in recent years, they have begun attempting to
martyr themselves in efforts to assert others as the cause and enemies for
their own suffering.
The horrible irony is that, of course, everybody feels a sense
of loneliness and sexual undesirability at some point in their sexual-social lives,
and many people experience prolonged periods without any form of consoling, intimate,
or sexual contact. Indeed, many of those people would come to feel a kind of
resentment or feeling of persecution. The test is, as ever, whether one will
work to overcome their own insecurities and shortcomings.
This ideology of self-improvement is common among the
card-carrying white-supremacist set, however hypocritical it is in practice.
Gone are the days when the Skinhead, or just “skin”, was the raging street-level
punk menace demonstrated in films like Romper Stomper or American History X.
Instead, they have been replaced by a breed of pseudo-intellectual racist that has
been brought up on the writings of Richard Spencer, the music of Burzum, and a
lurid fixation on European fascist history and eugenics.
Pagan symbolism, black metal, neo-intellectualism, survivalism,
and a weird amount of push-ups form the foundation of an ideological rubric that
entails elitism as a desired trait. This brand of self-help is popularized by
groups with cult-like followings and eye-catching branding like North American pagan-supremacist
group Operation Werewolf, who have made inroads into the Australian metal
community and in particular the secretive NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal)
music scene.
This exclusionist ideology, and the boot-camp elements that
persist within it, provide a fertile breeding ground for exclusionary ideas.
One of the ideas that has found root in that ideology, whether by design or by availability,
is a deep-rooted notion of physical and intellectual superiority. This
superiority is sought through all sorts of conventional and unconventional
means, from brutal exercise regimes like a mean-spirited CrossFit to magical runes
and symbolic ritualism. This leaning to occult and pagan ritualism mixed with
personal elitism and nebulous nationalist rhetoric also allows for an ideation
of what constitutes a superior individual; what is the makeup of the elite of
humankind under this ideology? White, Norse warriors fighting their Christian
invaders; a legend of an underestimated clan rallying pure bloodfire to defeat their
imperialist oppressors.
This has bred a form of old European racism, not co-signed
with Australian Christocentric ideals, that bubbles under the surface, separate
but very much alongside the traditional breeds of racism growing here.
Through these incursions into our society, these actors have
become somewhat emboldened, although not necessarily in the ways one would
imagine.
I recall an encounter in 2012 where I attended a concert in
Brisbane at a prominent metal club. Two men walked in, one wearing a t-shirt
with the logo for UK white power organisation Blood and Honour and the other
wearing a shirt with a logo for criminal skinhead group Hammerskins. They
proudly began throwing ‘Seig Heil’ signs in the middle of the crowd. I, being
the drunk asshole that I am when Nazis are throwing salutes in public, did the
drunk-guy thing and started blowing them kisses and cutthroats to piss them
off. It worked. They attempted to fight me in the street outside but the
incident was broken up by security and other punters.
I encountered one of these skinheads approximately 2 years
later at a concert. He was alone this time, but he recognised me and wanted to
have words. I expected that I was going to get jumped or something similar (I’ve
had a few run-ins with the local skinheads, to be honest). Instead he was
intent on having a loud, street-side debate about the merits of racial eugenics
and European history to show the lineage of white civilization, with a neat
side of misogyny and Nietzschean-Ubermensch philosophy to round out the flavours.
I had little interest in debating history and eugenics with a proud suburban
Nazi, but I had the very weird privilege/discomfort of watching my brother, who
was studying a Masters Degree in History at the time, take on the task with
academic smarminess. I do recall our Nazi friend mentioning he had just spent
some time in prison in an instinctive attempt at intimidation, but he was reticent
to say what he was incarcerated for and it didn’t have the presumably-desired
effect on this occasion.
And again I am struck by something, parallel to the
knowledge that I’ve met these people, or people just like them, and that is
that I know them; they have begun to make themselves recognisable, and they are
everywhere. They are not hiding like they used to, or like we thought they used
to; they are engaging you in debate and daring you to hold yourself tall against
them while they try to frighten you. They are seeking representation, and they
are meeting in groups. They are losing their fear of us faster than we are
losing our fear of them.
But it is a fragile ideology in a lot of ways because it is
a personal ideology borne of low-rent eugenics and confused mythos-making, and
attaching oneself to such a fragile ideology does not allow a great deal of
room to be stronger than the flaws of that ideology.
And there is something in that, and in Ms Lavin’s book, and in
the crusading of the heroes contained therein, that still remains true and can
be thought of as a lesson if not a moral responsibility; that, like a thief
under the gaze of the Basilisk, this movement turns to stone if it is seen.
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