white nationalism - book - 2003 - Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America

Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism
Carol M. Swain and Russ Nieli
Cambridge University Press
2003
298 pages


    Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism is the second book that I’ve read by Carol M. Swain.  This text can be viewed as a companion to her book, The New White Nationalism in America, which has already been profiled on this blog, and which purports to analyze and critique new forms of radical hate organizations in pre-Millennial America. In this book Swain and her collaborator, Russell Nieli (a lecturer at Princeton University), interview several leading figures of the contemporary White Power scene that Swain already discussed at length.  Such individuals as Lisa Turner of the World Church of the Creator (a footnote mentions that she has since left this organization) National Alliance leader William Pierce (now deceased, but arguably the most influential American Neo-Nazi of the last forty years) David Duke, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Matthew Hale (currently incarcerated), and a number of others are all given a forum by Swain and Nieli.

The book reveals the interviewees as articulate and thoughtful despite their hateful rhetoric.  This is not necessarily surprising since the interview subjects are already the spokespeople for a variety of hate organizations, and being articulate and thoughtful is their only real job.  Interestingly, many of these subjects, such as David Duke, have internalized aspects of politically correct discourse (despite their overt hostility to that form of language) and position themselves as simply crusaders for equal rights for the white race.  The implication is that granting equal rights to all races is, in fact, to give preference to all non-white races, even though there was a time when white-preference was taken for granted and a social structure that largely remains in-tact to this day was built on such a principle.
Typical of the speech of these leaders are expressions that the races are better off as separate but equal social entities.  According to these society would function better, and  everyone would be happier under the circumstances of racial separatism.  As articulate as these interview subjects may be, they are essentially calling for a return to prehistoric tribal units where each group's name for themselves is also their linguistic term for 'people'. 

The interviewers do not ask challenging questions of their subjects.  Presumably this no-pressure approach was a means to elicit as much about their ideologies as possible when, I'm sure, they're treated with hostility in so many other contexts.  In merely asking questions about their white power perspectives, however, this book is virtually useless.  Leaders of fringe movements generally strain themselves to have their voices heard and make use of virtually every low-fi communications technology available to them to get their messages out.  Conducting research on any of Swain and Neili’s subjects is not difficult as they have all made frequent use of the internet to speak in their own words. Furthermore the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center (possibly the two best sources for recent information on the racist right-wing) have been collecting information on all of these people for years.  Contemporary Voices White Nationalism is only really notable for being a book.


Contemporary Voices White Nationalism significantly altered my perception of Swain's other book, The New White Nationalism in America... for the worse.  The New White Nationalism in America goes to great length to present the contentious issues surrounding the affirmative action program, and suggesting that this is the issue that’s driving people towards White Nationalism organizations.  Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism reveal that many of these leaders simply believe in the superiority of the white race over all other races and that affirmative action is a means of bringing inferiors into positions where they don’t belong.  These interview subjects state such views themselves and no one needs to add any commentary to make their views clear.  While Swain, in her extended discussion of white nationalism, suggests that there is a need for reform on affirmative action programs, Contemporary Voices brings Swain’s arguments back to this Earth, where the white nationalists are exactly the deranged bigots you would expect them to be.  If there is to be a discussion on such programs, lets not have it at the request of fringe white power people.


The New Voices of White Nationalism shows its author (Swain) arguing that an emerging group of educated white-power radicals were gaining in strength because they were capable of articulating arguments about racial issues in a manner that appealed to a particular segment of the American populace.  Contemporary Voices in White Nationalism shows that very group of educated white-power radicals to actually be pompous and intellectually bankrupt pseudointellectals (a number of them hold advanced degrees and some have or do hold academic positions) who base their racial views on scientific theories that are generally laughed at, and studies that are methodologically ridiculous.  Many of the interviewees believe that the differences in the races are obvious, and are enunciated through the social performances of each race’s members.  This kind of “just open your eyes, goddammit!” argument fails to consider that many races have previously functioned under an elaborate cultural edifice of white privilege that arguably still exists, which prevented non-whites from participating in society.  The white nationalists who interest Swain tend to believe that white privilege is a natural right that has been subverted by the civil rights movement.  The real truth to be apprehended by an aware gaze is that multi-cultural societies actually function fine. Generally people of different cultures can come into contact with one another without conflict erupting.  

Unfortunately the memory of a past where society was organized strictly around white privilege lingers in the present day. The justification for that society was never based on anything truthful, but rather it was built (in part) upon the symbolic force of a large number grotesque racial stereotypes that continually return to haunt a minority of white folks who now must occasionally make contact with the embodiments of those repulsive images.  What's difficult for these White Nationalist people is the reality that inherent white superiority is no longer a socially diffuse idea that lives in everyone's heads.  As a closing note, I think that researchers who use this text and The New White Nationalism in America should also read Melvin L. Leiman's excellent text The Political Economy of Racism, as a counterpoint to some of Swain's textual representations of racial tensions and their causes.

street art - book - 2008 - Going Postal: Mailing Label Street Art

Going Postal: Mailing Label Street Art
Martha Cooper
Mark Batty Publisher
2008
99 pages

Martha Cooper is a photographer with a long-standing interest in urban culture and particularly in graffiti art.  Her work has been published in a variety of periodical publications (including National Geographic) and of her books, almost all relate to hip-hop culture and most of those pertain to graffiti, including her most famous work, Subway Art (published in 1984).  She was also interviewed by Cedar Lewisohn in Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, and is generally considered a pioneer in the representation of graffiti art.

One of Cooper’s talents has been to identify types of street art and capture as many different photographic representations of this type as she can.  Books like Subway Art are categorical archives of a peculiar graffiti form, and within this form sub-categories are perceived.  Cooper’s influence can be seen in books like Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco, where the author aggregates as many examples of one particular form into a single volume.  The graffiti form Cooper collected into the book Going Postal is the mailing label image.  Street artists use labels of various sizes as a medium to carry their art.  Many of the label-works are writer’s tags, drawings-by-hand, and some are printed images.  The obvious advantage of the use of the mailing label is that the act of creation is separated from the act of vandalism, thereby reducing risk of detection to the artist.  The other advantage is that the United States Postal Service gives away its labels for free.

Going Postal contains hundreds of photos of mailing label graffiti in its 99 pages.  After a brief introductory essay by the author, in which she describes her discovery of sticker art and her apprehension of different forms of its content, the book is devoted strictly to images.  Cooper does contain numerous examples of each kind of content, from tags to amusing drawings, to political messages.  These images are not grouped in any way and aside from a list of credits at the end of the book, there is very little information attached to the works.  A reader may begin to take for granted that the images are all from the United States because USPS logos are left exposed on many of the works, but some images are drawn on German labels too.  Cooper appears to give priority to the wide array of creative possibilities that these labels have opened for street artists.  Information such as placement locations is not included, which is typical of street art books.

Going Postal is published by Mark Batty Publisher, a recently established book publishing company that appears to routinely release new books on street art. 

hippies - book - 1969 - The Children of Change

The Children of Change
Don Fabun
Glencoe Press
1969
39 pages

Sooo.... as we already know, the 1960s were a different time, and much of what has made it different has since been absorbed by the culture industry and turned into spectacle.  Nowadays the long hair on boys, psychedelic good vibration groovitude and “bone rattling” rock music are defanged signifiers of rebellion in pop-culture productions.  Tattoos are hardly rebellious anymore, let-alone long hair, guitar-playing and new age spirituality - but I’m writing this from a historical situation where the hippie phenomenon has had 40 years to sink in.  In 1969, the hippies were an incomprehensible collage of hair, weird clothes and zoned-out facial expressions, and Don Fabun, thankfully, produced this short guide to help the uninformed understand what’s going on.

The Children of Change is a slim volume that my friend Richard (thanks, Richard) from Ottawa’s Bytown Bookshop mailed to me.  It’s author, Don Fabun, was the publications director of the public affairs department of Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation which basically meant he published a corporate magazine.  He also edited a science fiction magazine called The Rhodomagnetic Digest and wrote a few other books about creativity and communication.  This particular book appears to be a condensed and unscholarly version of The Making of A Counterculture, and I suspect that if it had a purpose or target readership, it was the sympathetic adult generation that preceded or birthed the hippies.

Fabun’s book is a small collection of short pieces that attempt to summarize the attitudes and attributes of the hippie counterculture that the author refers to repeatedly as the “the children of change.”  Fabun laces his discussions with hippie talk and thus creates the sense that he comes from the underground, despite his title as Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation Director of Publications.  He describes the importance of music (and lists several relevant albums) film, hair, and the underground press and also discusses other issues like student revolt, new age occultism, and communal living.  These discussions are buttressed by favorable quotations taken from commentators on the hippie phenomenon, like Gore Vidal.

There are two significant omissions made by Fabun, that make The Children of Change an incomplete discussion of its subject.  The first omission is any mention of drug use.  Everyone knows that hallucinogenics and marijuana were in widespread use among hippies during the 1960s.  The hallucinogenic influence can be found in many of the cultural forms discussed by Fabun, including the underground press and the music of the period, and it is difficult to make a judgment on why the author neglected to mention the hippies will to alter their consciousnesses.  The second omission was any representation of non white “children of change”.  By the time The Children of Change was published the Black Panther Party was two years old and a considerable force in the American political scene.  I suspect that the publication was intended for a white middle-class readership of some kind, and hence it reproduces the “children of change” as an all white social turn.  

The final aspect of the book I would like to discuss are its illustrations.  The book is full of colourfully psychedelic illustrations by an unnamed artist.  The cover illustration bears a partially legible signature that I, so far, haven’t been able to extract a usable search-term from.  The book also features a number of photos of sculptures, blocky representations of hippies mostly, by an artist named Pat McFarlin.  The art is probably the best part of this book and, I suspect, comes directly from the culture this book puts under examination.

radical right - book - 1987 - Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right

Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right
James Coates
Hill and Wang
1987
294 pages

Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right is one of the earliest books to investigate the contemporary white nationalist and patriot movements in the United States.  This book is somewhat uneven, as it discusses what author James Coates describes as the ‘survivalist right’ which is an assortment of groups or individuals who are of disparate backgrounds and ideological bent (albeit within the sphere of right-wing radicalism), many of whom are not necessarily survivalist.   The author’s title phrase, likely conceived as an attempt to provide an appropriate umbrella term to evoke an emerging socio-cultural phenomena, is pressed into use by the author even if its not always appropriate.  Many of the groups the author discusses are white power organizations, some of whom are survivalist.  Some groups discussed are anti-government in the “paranoid style” and fit into a tradition that extends into the past and continues to this day with groups such as the Oath Keepers and the American Resistance Movement.  

James Coates is currently a retired investigative journalist who worked for decades at the Chicago Tribune.  He worked as a Pentagon correspondent and the Tribune’s White House reporter during the late-1970s to mid-1980s.  He was also an early adopter of personal computer technology and from 1993 to 2008 Coates wrote a computer advice column for his newspaper.  His interest in network communications and computer technologies are apparent in Armed and Dangerous as he discussed the use of bulletin board systems as a means for white nationalists and anti-government “patriots” to stay connected.  Coates even included a sampling of some of the menus and text that was featured on an anti-Semitic system called Chicago Liberty Net, creating a sense that these fringe groups were on the cutting edge in the use of consumer communications technologies.  Towards a similar horizon, Coates also discussed the survivalist right’s use of other media to disseminate their message, including the distribution of a popular tabloid published by the Liberty Lobby called Spotlight, and a public-access cable TV show titled Race and Reason produced by neo-nazi group White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger.

Coates investigations into the political fringe came at a time when there appeared to be a turn towards greater violence by the adherents of the ‘survivalist right’.  The publication of this book, however, predates a number of significant developments in the ‘survivalist right’, including the rise of the citizen’s militia movement, Timothy McVeh, the Unabomber -Theodore Kaczynski (who began mailing bombs before 1986 but did not cause serious injury to a target person before 1985), and the emergence of the internet (designed as a tool to maintain communications in a nuclear war scenario) to build upon the communications networks already established via BBS systems.  The far-right groups and individuals of the 1990s were even more fringe and dramatic than those of 1980s, and what Coates describes are the predecessors of some of the most extreme pre-Millennium survivalist-right adherents.  Coates discussed The Order, a radical and violent vanguard for the white nationalist movement.  The Order, lead by Robert Matthews (a man who, according to Kevin Flynn in his book The Silent Brotherhood, was alleged to have joined the far-right John Birch Society at the age of twelve) provided funds for a number of white nationalist groups through a series of armed robberies and counterfeiting ventures.  The Order also planned assignations against anti-racist enemies including lawyer Morris Dees (founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center) and caustic liberal Denver area radio personality Alan Berg, whom The Order murdered in 1984.  

Operating over a brief two-year period, The Order provided some of the most dramatic material in Coates book.  Robert Matthews perished in a fire that began during a gunfight with the FBI.  Coates also discusses other dramatic episodes of the ‘Survival Right’ however, including Gordon Kahl, a Posse Comitatus leader who in 1983 died in a shootout with law enforcement after he was already being hunted for the murder of two Federal Marshals.  The Posse Comitatus is a loosely connected social movement that refuses to recognize any form of authority above the county level.  They consider the US federal government to infiltrated by Jewish agents, the federal income tax as illegal and, according to Coates, their leaders gave seminars to instruct failing farmers to refuse to repay their federal loans.  

In addition to the Gordon Kahl episode, Coates described other dramatic scenarios with the survivalist right including the murder-house survivalist compound inhabited by serial killer Charles Ng.  Ng’s inclusion is a partial deviation from the theme of the book, which is to identify emerging trends in a crossing of far-right ideologies with a violence-driven survival instinct in anticipation of a (racial/political/nuclear) catastrophe.  Ng was an ex-Marine survivalist, but his status as a sadistic serial killer does not fit into any model of far-right behavior or organization.  Of course, Coates was attempting to identify a new form of cultural activity that appeared to be emerging at the time of his writing, and perhaps the inclusion of Ng appeared appropriate as him and a number of other survivalists were individualist “trust no one” paranoid types.  Ng was a hypermacho sadist survivalist, and he resembles, in attitude, the fictional Holnists of David Brin’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel The Postman. 

The only real pushback against these groups that is detailed in Armed and Dangerous comes in the form of law enforcement shootouts or IRS investigations.  The year after Coates text was published, in 1988, the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued Tom Metzger into near-inactivity.  In 2000 the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Aryan Nations (a white nationalist religious group) for over six million dollars.  The SPLC strategy of seeking financial damages against white power groups has proved very successful in undermining the strength of what Coates has called the survivalist right.
 
Books that survey the ultrafar-right groups often show difficulty in interpreting those groups along more than one axis of understanding. Coates text is likely one of the closest (that I’ve read) in achieving such a synthesis.  Not all of the groups Coates discussed are intrinsically survivalist, but most of them are, and they do all preach violence and most preach racialized hate.  Morris Dee’s mid-90s book, Gathering Storm, about the citizens militia movement, attempted to portray all such organizations as racist, which was not entirely true.  Meanwhile, Richard G. Mitchell’s 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times hardly acknowledges the racist aspect of these movements (although there is a brief discussion of Aryan Nations), even though Robert Matthews’ widow, Zillah Craig, appears in the text.  Mitchell rather emphasizes the millenarian aspect of the groups, which is also featured in Coates analysis of his subject.  Finally, Coates describes numerous elements of mainstream culture that appear to touch upon the virulent attitudes expressed by the right-wing’s radical edge 

parecon - book - 2008 - Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century

Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century
Chris Spannos (ed)
AK Press
2008
416 pages

Real Utopia is a collection of texts, edited by Z Communications contributor/editor Chris Spannos, that focuses on practical applications of activist Michael Albert’s and economist Robin Hahnel’s parecon theory which they first outlined in a book titled Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty-First Century.  Parecon, an abbreviated term for ‘participatory economics’, is a theory for an economic system, devised by leftist radicals, that proposes a more horizontal and equitable structure for wealth distribution than the dominant capitalist system.  Parecon theory requires - or would likely result in - changes to the structure of the society that implemented it.  Such changes would include greater egalitarianism at the workplace (and workers given managerial duties), greater equality within families, social ownership of property, an end to racism, and numerous other progressions towards the development of a participatory society.

Spannos’ book features numerous contributions by writers and interviewees who have either thought deeply about, or have practical experience in attempting to implement, a society that allows its citizens greater participation in its forms.  The book contains six sections divided according to a different aspect or stage in the development of a parecon society, and each section contains a mix of interviews and written pieces that look towards that goal.  The interviewees include Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, parecon’s chief theorists, and also Noam Chomsky.  Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Dancing in the Street, Nickel and Dimed, and a number of other books, engaged Michael Albert in a conversation about parecon as a post-capitalist and post-Marxist economic model.

Many of the pieces are calls by the authors for the adoption of parecon-esque ideas by individuals who operate in various social fields or at particular global areas.  The arts, Africa, Eastern Europe, and sexual relationships are all objects to which the subject of parecon organization may be applied.  Other pieces describe businesses which attempt to put the parecon theories into praxis, including discussions of South End Press/Z Communications, the Vancouver Parecon Collective, and Winnipeg Manitoba's Mondragon Bookstore.  The book is varied in its content and is likely a good companion to Albert and Hahnel’s original texts.