Brad Whitsel. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Volume 24, Issue 2, April 2001.
This article examines the process of ideological change that accompanied the evolution of the American neo-Nazi movement. The movement’s psychological worldview has historically been dominated by a catastrophic millennial outlook that looks forward to the destruction of an environing order perceived to be degraded and beyond hope for renewal. By the 1970s, however, certain organizational changes had taken place in the movement that led to its fracture along separate philosophical tracks. While the millennial underpinnings of the American neo-Nazi movement’s belief structure remained largely intact, highly idiosyncratic versions of the neo- Nazi Aryan myth began to emerge at this time. The ideological mutations that occurred came as a result of neo-Nazi groups adopting a “cultic milieu” existence in society’s fringe underground of deviant beliefs. British sociologist Colin Campbell’s overlooked theoretical concept of the cultic milieu may provide new insights into the process of ideological transformation in extremist groups.
In his classic work on millennial faith, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn recognized a connection between the sociopsychological characteristics of the radical chiliasts of late Medieval Europe and more recent twentieth century millenarian groups. The linkage perceived by Cohn was a common psychological disorientation, fueled by the group’s own interpretation, or creation, of apocalyptic lore. For Cohn’s fifteenth century revolutionary chiliasts, the stress and anxiety associated with living in the imagined End Times motivated believers to prepare for the arrival of a divinely engineered earthly catastrophe. Although their strategies differed, depending upon the group’s understanding of its role in the final eschatological drama, fanatical Christian sects of the era saw worldly history being brought to its consummation by a final struggle of transcendental importance between the forces of Good and Evil. This vision, however, was far from bleak. The expected cataclysm promised to bring about a new Golden Age in which the world would be transformed and redeemed. Those absorbed with this outlook became a “chosen people” rewarded with terrestrial and collective salvation for their epic exploits.
Cohn’s insights into the transcendental aspirations of millennial groups provide us with an understanding of the Golden Age myth. As suggested by the resuscitation of this impulse in more contemporary times, it appears that the salvific and transformative features of millennial thought surface periodically in the worldviews of some social collectivities. Within the American context, the 1990s seem to have marked the advent of End Time activism among a small number of new religious movements and deviant sects. In three of the most noteworthy cases, which included David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Montana Freemen, each group envisaged the advance of an epoch of earthly turmoil before the faithful were to be delivered to the Kingdom of God. In these recent examples, the group’s millenarian theology inspired believers to defensively withdraw from the environing world, an act that either eventually launched the group on a course of confrontation with the state or (as transpired in Heaven’s Gate) led it to engage in mass suicide.
While the recent coming of the calender millennium resulted in the growth of apocalyptic angst in portions of American culture, the concern here is with a specific, radical social movement comprised of revolutionary groups in the millenial tradition. The referred to movement has been described alternatively as “neo-fascist” or “neo-Nazi.” It is likely that the overall size of the multigroup American neo-Nazi movement presently does not exceed 400–500 members, a figure that has been declining since 1978, when a reported 1,200 “hard-core” activists filled its ranks. Since the terms neo-fascist and neo-Nazi are overused, their meaning has been somewhat diluted and it becomes necessary to identify the movement and locate its millenarian tendencies with precision.
Ideological Characteristics of the American Neo-Nazi Movement
Although sharing some ideological traits with the larger extreme right-wing orbit of groups, the various organizations in the American neo-Nazi fold are differentiated by their adherence to a worldview traced directly to the Hitler regime. This defining feature of neo-Nazi belief provides groups in this miniscule social constellation with a set of commonly observed precepts that had their genesis in Nazi Germany. A variety of extremist groups identify with aspects of neo-Nazi belief, especially its anti-Semitism and racial attitudes. It is important to note, however, that while there is some overlap between the views of these groups and those in the neo-Nazi constellation, their philosophies are not coterminous. Groups rooted in the Nazi tradition display a reverence for Adolph Hitler, who is uniformly viewed as a visionary figure, and otherwise observe the dictates of National Socialist doctrine.
A detailed examination of National Socialism is beyond the scope of this article, however, its core sentiments can be fairly summarized in three guiding beliefs anchored in the platform of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The first sprung from the view that the national community (the Volk) was on the verge of ruination as decadent materialism eroded the culture’s spiritual values. The second was grounded in the concept of Aryan racial supremacy and the image of a racially homogenous state. Thirdly, the doctrine idealized a form of corporatist-authoritarian government, and saw as illegitimate and impotent the liberal model upon which western democracies were based. These historical components of National Socialism established the foundation from which post–World War II neo-Nazi groups evolved. Despite some intermingling between neo-Nazis and other protest groups on the larger American extremist landscape, as has occurred in violent, nihilistic Skinhead circles and in the Christian Identity movement, their respective thoughtworlds should not be conflated. National Socialist belief has often been incorporated as a standard theme by groups on the xenophobic and racist fringe, but in this manner it has normally been grafted onto a preexisting religious or secular doctrine, and not arrived at organically.
By the late 1950s, a grass-roots effort was underway in America to build a mass movement devoted to the precepts of National Socialism. The initiative was taken by George Lincoln Rockwell, a one-time U.S. Navy Commander who formed the American Nazi Party (ANP) in Arlington, Virginia. Rockwell’s small cadre of zealots, which never numbered more than a few hundred nationwide, imagined themselves as an elite vanguard of Aryan supermen who would one day succeed in their bid to engineer a political revolution designed to lead to the birth of a Nazi-like state. Although Rockwell’s movement was committed to a strategic course of gaining power by electoral means, culminating in his failed 1965 bid for the governorship of Virginia, his group fused together elements of both the secular and the divine in its program. Likening his following to the early Christians in the catacombs, Rockwell saw his contingent as religious men who, like himself, were guided by a mysterious destiny.8 Rockwell’s view of himself as a Nazi leader and student of Hitler was similarly cast in religious imagery. He perceived his relationship with Hitler in the same vein as St. Paul’s association with Jesus Christ.
With the demise of the ANP, which dissolved into a multitude of splinter organizations after Rockwell’s assasination by a fellow Party member in 1967, a division arose in the movement between activists over the issue of organizational strategy. Here, the major source of contention was whether to pursue the cautious path of mass action and coalition building, as was favored by Rockwell, or to embark upon a plan of revolutionary violence. Despite some differences over strategic approaches, the successor groups to the ANP share ideational linkages with their predecessor and have uniformly adhered to the millennial dream of constructing a National Socialist New Order in America. Such a vision is totalistic and reflects a pattern of thinking historically found in millennial movements. Indeed, clear distinctions between religious and political conceptions are eroded in the millenarian weltanschauung. Cosmologies of a millennial nature provide believers with a conceptual framework for universal order that defies artificial distinctions between politics and religion.
Variations of Millennial Thought
Undergirding all millennial belief systems is the expectation for the sudden conclusion of earthly history, an event that is to be proceded by the arrival of a long-awaited glory period for the Elect. But it is necessary to consider that the interpretive frameworks used by millennial communities are grounded in specific group-oriented psychologies. Thus, dramatic differences may be apparent in the ways that groups construct and visualize their cosmic blueprints for universal order. These divisions are reflected in the views of the two dominant camps of End Time believers. Traditionally, scholars have subdivided millennial philosophies into two distinct categories, postmillennialism and premillennialism, both of which are derived from Christian theology and signify a specific time when the millennial age on earth will begin. In its Christian context, postmillennialism is based on the belief that Christ will appear during the time following the establishment of an ideal world. Postmillennialists, or “progressivists,” appraise worldly conditions in optimistic terms and emphasize the eventual realization of God’s kingdom on earth. This forward-looking expectation entails a broader, more inclusive conception of the Elect and harbors a vision of human progress that is realized through cooperation with a divinely orchestrated plan for earthly salvation.
Conversely, premillennialists, or “catastrophists,” believe that the apocalypse is inevitable and part of a supernatural plan. Catastrophists have a pessimistic view of society and stress the downward progression of history. This outlook is driven by the conviction that evil is ascendant in the world and only the total destruction of the corrupted earthly realm by a divine act can purge it of its affliction. In the mindset of the catastrophic millennialist, it is necessary that this period of cleansing destruction begin before the world can be created anew. When applied to non-Christian belief systems, the pre- and postmillennial typologies might initially appear to be something of a forced fit. Nonetheless, while extrapolated directly from Christian theology, the categories are useful insofar as they provide general insights into the psychological frameworks of groups harboring either premillennial characteristics of pessimism about the future or postmillennial convictions of optimism. At a rudimentary level, each perspective sheds light on the most basic assumptions held by groups (whether or not formally religious) espousing visions of redemption and salvation.
American Nazism’s historic preoccupation with society’s decay and racial erosion demonstrates its anticipation of the arrival of a catastrophic new millennium. The thinly veiled apocalyptic struggle within the political doctrine of National Socialism was passed on to modern day revolutionaries who saw in it a salvific philosophy that looked forward to the dissolution of the degraded world and the achievement of a new and perfect society. Fortifying the Nazi theoreticians’ conviction in the Thousand-Year Reich was the image of a Teutonic civilization on the verge of creating a new world. It was this revelation of a new heaven and a new earth that provided the ostensibly secular doctrine with powerful religious undercurrents and expedited the onset of a cosmic war against the enemies of the Elect. As in prewar Germany, where National Socialist ideology offered the hope of cultural and racial renewal and, in the process, a quasireligious promise of transcendence, the resurrectionists of the theory eagerly embraced its transformational myths. In this vision of the future, redemption for the Elect (and the attainment of the Heavenly City) is tied to the death of the environing order. From the vantage point of the believer, faith in the imminent onset of the apocalyptic event conveys hope that the impure world will be overhauled and reordered in accordance with a desired plan. Thus, the anticipated cataclysm is understood by catastrophic millenarians to be both a source of rebirth and destruction. In this sense, the apocalyptic event reconfigures history, thereby initiating a new order of being for the Chosen.
The psychological worldview of the neo-Nazi movement has remained largely unchanged over its forty-year record in America. Throughout its history, a paranoid, dualistic outlook has shaped its view of reality. This perspective is fundamentally manichaean and begets zealot-like devotion both to the realization of the National Socialist state and to the violent defeat of all who oppose it. Although perceiving itself as marginalized and alienated by the despised surrounding society, the community of Aryan Elect weathers its psychic distress with the knowledge that the profane times in which it exists will ultimately give way, resulting in worldly regeneration and the start of a New Era.
Post-Rockwell Changes in Neo-Nazi Belief
What separates contemporary National Socialism in America from its historical roots is its adoption of increasingly idiosyncratic constructions of the Aryan Golden Age myth. Whereas Rockwell’s organization was structured along paramilitary lines and mimicked the SS men of The Third Reich, those that followed in its wake tended to gravitate away from the visible trappings of a National Socialist lifestyle. In part, the move was undertaken to avoid the negative public image of Nazism, which limited the extent to that the movement could successfully recruit new members. However, it was the philosophical mutations that gradually arose within the small cluster of avowedly National Socialist groups that more directly broke the movement free from its moorings in the ANP. The result was that by the mid-1970s National Socialism had begun to split into factions, many of which coalesced around the esoteric beliefs held by tiny collectivities, or influential single actors, involved in the neo-Nazi counterculture. This epoch in the history of American National Socialism came about as activists recognized the atrophy afflicting the movement following Rockwell’s death and searched for ways to infuse it with new energy.
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, a number of new neo-Nazi organizations took shape that adopted unprecedented interpretations of National Socialist ideology. These embryonic groups changed the philosophical direction of the movement in America by rejecting the mass action doctrine’s reliance upon patient waiting and movement growth before launching the anti-state revolution. Among the other new developments spawned during the post-Rockwell period were experiments in group living arrangements, primarily involving communalism. As a consequence of these trends, a diverse new circle of the National Socialist faithful appeared on the American scene. Not only did the new splinter groups marginalize within the movement the Rockwell generation of activists and the old strategy of mass action, but they infused the neo-Nazi subculture with a wide array of occultic, mystical, and countercultural beliefs.
Since the movement’s post-Rockwell era diffusion reshaped the ideological contours of neo-Nazism, it is important to address the ideas that began to percolate within its successor groups. In general, the spate of philosophical mutations that occurred took place along visibly religious and secular tracks. The most clearly recognizable was conceptually religious in nature and, in its major Odinist variation, included themes reconstructed from Aryan legend. Odinism combined worship of pre-Christian pagan deities, racial mysticism, and ritual magic in a unified belief structure having its historical roots in the cult of Odin, a youth movement born in Weimar-era Germany. Itself a form of millenarian faith, Odinism stressed the union between the Germanic peoples and the pantheon of Nordic Gods. In reaction to the bleak social and economic conditions of post–World War I Germany, Odinists immersed themselves in the ancient religion’s mysticism and found in it a way to validate their beliefs concerning the spiritual purity of Aryan blood. In resurrecting the Teutonic Gods, the early Odinists excavated the vision of a past Germanic Golden Age in an attempt to find psychological escape from the dark days of the Weimar Republic. The apocalyptic battle for Odinists (Valhalla) promised to return the Germanic peoples to a utopian way of life identified with folk and race following a heroic war against the enemy. Odinism’s emphasis on Aryan purity and the anticipation of a future war of cosmic proportions made it unusually compatible with National Socialism. Just as interest in the Norse-era belief attracted some followers in prewar Germany, it garnered a handful of devoted Aryan adherents in America. By the 1980s, extreme racialist Odinism had become a presence in the expanding mosaic of American neo-Nazi belief.
In addition, other manifestations of the esoteric religious impulse in the National Socialist movement appeared at this time. Of these, two are significant for their utilization of racial mysticism and for their founders’ glorification of Hitler as a messianic figure. Ben Klassen’s Church of the Creator, founded in 1973, built a cosmology of the divine on the veneration of the white race and called for a “racial holy war” (RAHOWA) against Jews and other minorities. Creatorism’s foundations were biological. Its creed was twofold: to improve the quality of the race by “upward breeding” and to inculcate in whites the desire to preserve their racial security in the face of a future worldwide race war. Klassen, the self-appointed “Pontifex Maximus” of the organization, devoted his efforts to debunking mainline religions, which he believed were “Jewish-concocted,” and “redeeming the mind and spirit of the white race.” His loosely structured Church, which took the form of a literature-selling mail-order ministry, nonetheless achieved some success in winning “converts” to Creatorism, a theology especially appealing to incarcerated elements of the National Socialist fold. The syncreticism inherent in Creatorism pervaded Klassen’s writings and included themes as diverse as organic farming, herbal medicine, racial eugenics, and millennial visions of a world government based on the National Socialist model. Klassen’s death in 1993, by suicide, left the Church of the the Creator in the hands of younger protégés who have since expanded its operational base to include chapters in 46 states.
William Pierce, a one-time assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University in the mid-1960s and former Rockwell associate, also served as an expositor of esoteric religion tied to National Socialist principles. Much like Klassen, Pierce extolled the virtues of the white race and believed Hitler’s efforts at state-led racial engineering to be worthy of emulation in America. Pierce’s brand of Aryan religion stressed a form of evolutionary racism that went much further than Klassen’s in synthesizing the scientific with the mystical. His religious cosmology, which, by the early 1970s, took on the name “Cosmotheism,” incorporated elements of early twentieth century “racial anthropology” literature, scientific Darwinism, and Teutonic mythology in its construction of a totalistic explanation for human evolutionary development. For Pierce, each race followed a predetermined course of historic destiny dependent upon its particular genetic blueprint. This system of evolutionary thought took on a spiritual meaning, however, since Cosmotheism posited the existence of a divine spark within the white race that was believed would propel it to the realization of godhood.
The general framework of Pierce’s Cosmotheistic religion is evident in the dystopian, apocalyptic novel The Turner Diaries, a work he wrote in 1978. Having sold over 200,000 copies, the novel has been a source of great financial assistance to the National Alliance, an organization founded by Pierce in 1974 dedicated to the development of an Aryan society and the “racial purification” of North America. The Turner Diaries briefly generated a flurry of attention during the weeks following the 19 April 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Upon discovering that Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the bombing, had acquired a strange fascination for Pierce’s piece of fictional work, the media catapulted the book into national news headlines. While most accounts of The Turner Diaries, including those by scholars, describe it as a piece of right-wing terrorist literature, little has been said of either its millennial message or its quasi-theological justification for violence, both of which emanate directly from Pierce’s Cosmotheist doctrine.
The Turner Diaries is a futuristic story of bloody racial revolution taking place in the 1990s. The account is told by the novel’s protagonist, Earl Turner, a participant in a terrorist army (the Organization) that wages a guerrilla struggle against a corrupted American government controlled by racial minorities and Jews. Motivated by the threat of white racial extinction, Turner’s revolutionary band engages the forces of the state (the System) in a campaign of unconventional, subversive warfare involving bombings, sabotage, and assasination. This strategy succeeds in sparking an all-out race war and, ultimately, in the overthrow of the government. Having achieved the objective of creating a white racial state in America, the Organization takes its war to a global level and turns loose its nuclear arsenal against the “alien hordes” who are seen to obstruct the evolution of the revitalized white race. The cleansing apocalypse takes place in 1999, a time not so coincidentally suggesting the coming arrival of a New Era of time and the eradication of an impure past.
Cosmotheism, Creatorism, and Odinism each were expressions of the religious impulse resonating through American National Socialism by the 1980s. But, at the same time, more secularized factions were advancing their own strange versions of Nazi “truth.” These conceptions of a fascist future were characterized by an eclectic millenarianism that seemingly accessed an even more diverse wellspring of countercultural thought than the syncretic construction of doctrine used by neo-Nazis in the religion camp. Whereas the latter joined together two central ideas (religion and National Socialism) to arrive at a hybrid form of millennial faith, secularists borrowed their ideas freely from a variety of sources. The mental universe of the secularists was actually not so distant from that of its schismatic counterpart. Both mutations of the National Socialist movement were fundamentally millennial and anticipated a catastrophic wave of fascist violence before the Elect would reign over the earthly Kingdom. However, in the more secularized vision of the Aryan Golden Age the transcendental aspects of National Socialism were somewhat less obvious. In general, the major difference between the religiously infused variety of neo-Nazism and the secularized version was that the latter lacked the theologically generated, other-worldly conceptions of ultimacy and salvation found in religious systems of belief. Such traces, for example, can be found in Cosmotheism and Creatorism in their bioracial convictions about evolutionary progress, as well as in the Odinist conception of a final apocalyptic struggle. This is not to imply that the millennial yearnings of secular neo-Nazis were any less forceful in their constructions of the imagined future National Socialist world—only that the secularists did not enmesh their ideas within formal theological doctrines.
Though the fantastic themes invoked by the secular “school” of neo-Nazism grafted ideas from some historic millennial traditions, these notions were cobbled together in unusual ways. Employing strains of thought taken from obscure sources, neo-Nazi revisionists molded these views into luxuriant and updated interpretations of the Aryan myth. Interestingly, some of the themes that would later be adapted by the secular millennialists had surfaced earlier in German National Socialist circles. Among these was the Global Ice Theory, a pseudo-scientific idea germinated in the alternative reality thought world of pre-World War I proto-Nazis. Reflective of the highly utopian aspects of the early German volkish community, the idea was based on speculations that rejected conventional theories about the evolution of the cosmos. In brief, the Global Ice Theory supposed a timeless, natural conflict between the elements of fire and ice. The theory alleged that ice-covered lunar objects orbiting the sun impacted the earth periodically and, as a result, provoked a wave of ecological and geological cataclysms culminating in the occurrence of a life-extinguishing ice age. In its original early twentieth century formulation, the theory alleged that the Teutonic Kingdom of Atlantis, which was purported to have attained a high level of civilization, was a victim of such a disaster. Despite the totality of the destruction wrought by the collisions, the apocalyptic effects of these lunar bombings were regularly overcome by the eventual reappearance of earthly life. For the Nazi regime, which elevated the astronomical thesis to the level of orthodox science, the Global Ice Theory became a useful instrument by which to advance the millennial myth of National Socialism. The Nazis fortified the theory’s volkish appeal by identifying the ultimate triumph of life over catastrophe with the destiny of the Aryan state. In its most nationalistic variation, the theory was used to demonstrate the natural clash of incompatible “elements” (i.e., races and cultures), and the inevitable course of earthly Aryan renewal that was believed would continue unabated following a new cataclysmic confrontation.
While never as well received by Hitler’s scientists as the Global Ice Theory, an equally arcane cosmology positing the existence of a geologically hollow earth also gained some Nazi supporters. Belief in a hollow earth had circulated in western occult and esoteric groups since the nineteenth century, but the bold claim that the earth was a spherical bubble (with all life residing on the inside) appealed to some Nazi occultists who advanced the crank idea as a “scientific” reality. The theory was never widely accepted among the scientific elite; however, it has been reported that a limited amount of state-funded research was directed toward investigating the military implications of the theory.
The strangeness of such theories found a place in the writings of some of Rockwell’s successors. Less “evangelical” than religious neo-Nazis in their efforts at promoting National Socialism, the secular millennialists were more concerned with simply glorifying the Nazi regime, validating its beliefs, and spreading the hope that National Socialism might take root in North America. In order to accomplish these objectives, secularists turned to the pen and used two types of literary genres, the “authoritative” research study and the novel, to advance their visions of a regenerate National Socialist order. Both forms of literature betrayed a common tendency to mix millenarian urges for a new Nazi era with sensationalistic interpretations of the regime’s exploits and adventures. The far-fetched quality of this literature, which often took on the appearance of poorly written science fiction, served a dual purpose; it was a statement of faith for those infatuated with the image of a rejuvenated Third Reich, as well as a useful means to introduce to readers enticing versions of the Aryan myth. Thus, within the narrow neo-Nazi publishing world, authors produced feverishly inspired work pointing to the “successes” of unorthodox Nazi science and, often, to the alleged inaccuracies of conventional wisdom concerning Hitler’s demise. Examples of both arguments continue to appear in book form on the title lists of small publishing operations specializing in alternative science, revisionist history, and avowedly neo-Nazi genres.
In particular, one figure best represented the eclectic urge that marked this latent growth in National Socialism. This was Ernst Zundel, a German-born Canadian whose efforts at defending the actions of the Hitler regime led him to found an Ontario-based publishing house specializing in the production and sale of Holocaust-denial literature. In the late 1970s, Zundel employed the research study model to write UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons, a popular book in the neo-Nazi subculture that he undertook to foster National Socialist linkages with a growing readership fascinated with UFOs. The book argued that Hitler and a “Last Battalion” of the Nazi faithful had escaped the Allied onslaught and retreated to a temperate region of the “Inner Earth” located in Antarctica. While there, according to Zundel, Hitler’s scientists perfected futuristic technologies, including electromagnetically powered space vehicles and advanced secret weapons, in a planned attempt to save Western civilization from its degenerating condition. This revisionist account of Nazi history was so successful that it prompted Zundel to embark upon what was an unfulfilled plan to further promote it. The strange endeavor involved a high-publicity attempt at chartering a jet airliner flight over the secret Nazi territory in Antarctica for the benefit of the book’s interested readers. By combining the millennial theme of Nazi survivalism with ideas familiar to the UFO audience, Zundel’s fanciful account of a subterranean Nazi society found a wide readership, and certainly some believers, among those on the American esoteric fringe.
Unlike the religionists in the National Socialist constellation, whose theological systems were well suited to small organizational followings, the secularist outlook approximated a neo-Nazi pastiche of incongruous themes around which group formation was improbable. By disseminating their ideas in print, secularists secured an outlet for the fusionistic expression of National Socialism in the “virtual communities” of readers to whom their literary work was targeted. The idiosyncratic apocalypticism of the secularists was perfectly matched to the medium of the dystopian novel. Probably influenced at least to some extent by the success of The Turner Diaires, this particular genre has been adopted by other writers seeking to convey their illusions of a new Nazi epoch to a like-minded audience. A rather contemporary example of the National Socialist secular apocalyptic narrative is Randolph Calverhall’s pseudonymously authored 1991 novel, Serpent’s Walk, which weaves together the Nazi survival myth with the hope that National Socialism will emerge as the guiding world philosophy in the near-term future. The novel revolves around the exploits of Hitler’s SS elite, who survived the demise of The Third Reich and went underground in western society to infiltrate major corporations, the media, and government. After a century of gradually attaining power, the Nazi SS descendents form “the Party of Humankind,” an international political front disguising its true National Socialist orientation. Capitalizing on worldwide concerns about overpopulation, nuclear war, and economic unrest, the Party advocates the creation of a world society divided geographically along racial lines, a plan believed “to make this world better for the species, for the Western ethnos, and hence for all humanity.” The Party’s objective is ultimately achieved through violent revolution against the opposing forces of western democracies. By the turn of the twenty-first century, when the novel concludes, western society adopts the principles of National Socialism as the foundation of its cultural weltanschauung.
The Cultic Milieu as a Habitat for Fringe Belief
Whether in a religious or more secular form, the group mutations that unfolded in American National Socialism displayed a peculiar countercultural style. In terms of its sociological structure and worldview, the post-Rockwell generation of neo-Nazis continued to evolve as a millennial counterculture thriving apart from the prevailing currents of thought in the dominant society. The movement’s recent record of transmutation has resulted in the effervescence of a structurally revised and more diverse National Socialist network. Its fracture along different philosophical tracks in the 1970s and 1980s facilitated the interpenetration of new themes in neo-Nazi circles, a continuing process that demonstrates the movement’s creativity in reinventing itself.
Conventional theories of extremism offer only partial explanations for the growth of radical social movements harboring anti-statist views and possessing the potential for violence. In their attempts at elucidating the causes for mobilization in fascist-style groups, political and social studies scholars have relied predominantly upon a body of post-World War II social movement theories. These standard hypotheses attributed extremist group mobilization to a variety of causes, including: “massification,” which pointed to the group’s psychological estrangement from the environing social order; and “status displacement,” a concept claiming that a community’s perceived dispossession leads to extremist activism, as well as correlating the activity to declines in the country’s economic cycle.53 All of these concepts derived from post-World War II theorists’ formulation of a pluralist/extremist model of American society in which extremists (on both the Right and Left) were located at opposite ends of a political spectrum dominated by the culture’s majoritarian center. The pluralist/extremist theories that emerged from the 1950s through the 1970s assumed that groups on the far Right margin of society’s unilinear spectrum fit a predictable “extremist” profile that included social isolation and sub-average socioeconomic and educational status. Unfortunately, none of the more traditional theories addressed the issue of ideological mutation in radical movements, nor have they done much to demonstrate how the ideological content of countercultural belief might energize extremists. These gaps leave open questions about the circumstances under which philosophical or structural shifts take place in extremist groups and how specific convictions, such as millennial belief, may inspire those on the societal fringe.
A new starting point from which to examine these questions emanates from the field of the sociology of religion. Rather than fixating on the political marginalization of extremists that dominated the approach of the pluralist/extremist theories, the application of a more comprehensive sociopsychological analytical framework might better offer insights into the long-term development and internal changes of radical countercultural movements. British sociologist Colin Campbell’s concept of the “cultic milieu” provides scholars with a largely unexplored analytical theory which, if incorporated into the study of extremist movements, promises to shed new light on questions pertaining to countercultural group transformation. Although originally articulated in 1972, Campbell’s sociological model has received little attention until quite recently by academics interested in the beliefs of societally deviant movements. This oversight draws attention to the unfortunate tendency among scholars studying forms of extremism to refrain from searching for theoretical generalizations about the phenomenon and to remain locked into conventional approach explanations.
It requires clarification that Campbell used the term “cult” in a neutral manner to typologize a style of heretical or deviant social movement distinguished from others, such as religious sects, by its unusual organizational structure and fluctuating beliefs. For Campbell, the cultic milieu described the nature of the heterodox ideas embraced both by religious and nonreligious counterculturalists, as well as the total “cultural underground” of the alternative social system in which deviant beliefs flourished. The varied unorthodox belief systems absorbed in the cultic milieu, which include all forms of unconventional and esoteric knowledge, solidify and reinforce the cultic subculture’s consciousness of its deviant status.
The sense of psychological separatism that permeates the cultic milieu is fostered by its denizens’ adherence to concepts produced and cultivated in a distinctive ideological universe. In this subterranean world of ideas, society’s accepted knowledge and the mainstream sources that “produce” it, such as the media, governments, and universities, are considered to be corrupted and unenlightened. Thus, “the truth” is believed to be found in secret and remote regions located “off the grid” from the larger culture. Functioning as an unobtrusive, parallel society to that of the dominant social order, the cultic milieu is perpetuated by its exclusive conception of the world and a network of groups, idiosyncratic beliefs, and means of communication.60 Despite the heterogeneity of deviant beliefs absorbed in its reservoir of arcane and esoteric ideas, the cultic milieu world is strangely unified in one respect—its total cultural system is divorced from the dominant orthodoxies of the environing society.
There is, however, another aspect of the concept that bears attention, both for its insights into the cultic underground and, in particular, for its relevance to the process of mutation displayed by National Socialist groups. Social movements in the cultic milieu are by no means stable, nor do their beliefs or organizational patterns remain constant. Rather, groups in this constellation tend to be ephemeral and are governed by a lifecycle process. Over time, these collectivities ultimately fractionate and, in doing so, give birth to new groups. The process is cyclical and facilitates the recycling of ideas (and groups). This continual process of cult birth, reformation, and death suggests that the cultic milieu is a permanent part of society, while the individual cult is a transitory phenomenon. Understood in this light, the evolution of neo-Nazism can be seen as following a life-course progression not unlike other countercultural movements. Since groups in this social network are fundamentally protean and malleable, their ideological boundaries are subject to reconfiguration. This, in fact, was precisely what transpired in the National Socialist fold as believers, drawing upon the vast storehouse of heretical knowledge comprising the cultic milieu, assimilated components of diverse heterodox belief systems to build new variations of the Aryan Golden Age myth. The sources upon which the 1970s and 1980s-era neo-Nazis relied in their adaptations of the National Socialist dreamscape were established representations of unorthodox knowledge with roots in the cultural underground of society. UFOs, hollow-earth theories, and Teutonic mysticism, among other esoterica, all were products of the resilient cultic thoughtworld to which neo-Nazis were linked. The embrace of such ideas and their assimilation into reconstituted forms of National Socialism occurred as a function of the information dispersal process within the cultic milieu. Although largely unrelated to each other or, for that matter, to the core precepts of National Socialism, these fringe beliefs fit comfortably within the sociopsychological parameters of neo-Nazi culture. The ease with which obscure systems of thought were grafted onto neo-Nazism points to the free interchange of society’s “stigmatized” ideas taking place in the cultic underground.
The cultic milieu is separate, but not totally immune, from the collective anxieties of the larger society. Nowhere is this tenuous tie more apparent than with popular culture’s fixation on the recent end of a thousand-year cycle of time, which conveyed strong symbolism both about new beginnings and finality in broad sectors of American society. The intensity with which millennial thinking had enveloped contemporary culture, in media, politics, and religion, impacted the cultic milieu’s alternative social system. One notable example will suffice. In the late 1990s, fears reverberating through the dominant culture concerning the so called “Y2k” computer bug were refracted and magnified in the underground cultic world. While some concerns were justifiable, according to public officials, popular dread over the potential consequences of Y2k attained a more highly distilled level of potency among groups in the cultic milieu. That conventional knowledge-rejecting groups in the cultic constellation did, over this matter, “tune into” the environing order’s Y2k anxieties is not surprising. Having had their disaster-prone ideas reified by mainstream sources of information, these underground collectivities found further “evidence” to support connecting the Y2k phantom with apocalyptic visions of social, economic, and political chaos.
Conclusion
Although the practice has been to overgeneralize from a limited number of examples, a case can be made that chiliastic extremists tend toward excitation during calendrical fin de siecle periods. The decade of the 1990s seems to bear this out, as does the wave of apocalyptic activism and nihilistic violence that impacted parts of eastern Europe and Russia at the turn of the last century. The more awe-inspiring image, of course, involved the passing of the millennial epoch, an event that might have exponentially stimulated the countercultural imagination. Naturally, attempts at linking cultic milieu activism to the psychological symbolism of fleeting time are speculative endeavors. Not only are generalizable cases limited in number, but the “black box” that represents extremist psychological motivations for violence is difficult for researchers to penetrate. Moreover, dispassionate assessments of the possible ways that radical apocalyptists have interpreted the dawn of a new calendrical age were blurred by superheated media reporting and the resultant cultural atmosphere of concern that had arisen about anticipated outbreaks of millennial fervor. Nonetheless, academics and policymakers are more acutely aware, primarily as a result of recent acts of domestic extremism, that concerted efforts at understanding societally deviant worldviews help to reveal their underlying sources of motivation. Further research into the group psychology of extremists, with careful attention to the literature they produce and read, remains the best available means to predict whether or not violent activism by millenarians is probable.
When immersed in an ideological environment as impenetrable to outsiders as the cultic milieu, counterculturalists effectively constrain disclosure of their attitudes from the larger society. Herein remain potentially troubling uncertainties. While the cultic underground may be the repository of eccentricity, its darker regions also contain rejected knowledge which, depending upon the predispositions of those receiving it, might elicit violence. Such a response seems far more likely among catastrophic millennialists who seek validation for their communities’ views about the world’s declining condition and the forces perceived to be responsible for it. Convictions of this sort carry a natural appeal for “dispossessed” millennialists seeking psychic escape from an encompassing culture believed to be worthy of destruction.
Unfortunately, predictive assessments about future changes in a cultic-style group’s outlook are difficult to make with a high degree of accuracy. The subterranean repository of ideas to which such groups are linked comprises a shielded “hot-house” of heterodox perspectives. The implications that follow for the agencies entrusted with the state’s internal security are at least twofold. First, it should be considered that extremist groups once appearing to be static in terms of organizational structure and ideology may, over time, take on new characteristics. As the splintering of (and mutations within) the American neo-Nazi movement demonstrates, extremist organizations are susceptible to structural reconfigurations, the results of which can produce embryonic splinter groups whose convictions may be differentiated from those of their ideological forebears. This is probable when the mutating group has fully immersed itself in the alternative reality outlook of the cultic milieu. Indeed, once having descended into this cultural underground, the extremist group is likely to adopt an increasingly idiosyncratic worldview as its belief structure becomes synthesized with other currents of society-rejecting thought. It is this potential for extremist groups to undergo ideological transformation in the cultic milieu that compounds the problems associated with effectively monitoring their actions.
Second, further study needs to be devoted to understanding the dynamics of change in extremist groups. For example, attention might usefully be directed to the causal factors that stimulate ideological mutation in these organizations and the circumstances (or forms of internal or external stress) that facilitate it. By examining the case of the American neo-Nazi movement, where leadership turnover dissolved organizational structure and led to its absorption within the cultic milieu environment, researchers can begin to ascertain the forces at work that provoke change among radical countercultural groups. Additionally, the analysis of extremist groups known to have gravitated toward an alternative reality outlook might yield insights into the general patterns of ideological modifications (e.g., paranoia and anti-statism) likely to take shape in the cultic milieu. Such information may be a useful starting point for law-enforcement agencies, especially since little is presently known about the psychological mechanisms inciting extremists to pursue strategies of violence.