2019-03-17 Illinois: Christchurch Massacre & the White Power Movement

[Rev.Cambeul]

The Christchurch Massacre and the White Power Movement

The horrific attack in New Zealand was not the work a lone wolf or a few isolated radicals. It's the latest in a series of violent events carried out by a transnational movement that wants to foment race war.

Kathleen Belew | Dissent Magazine | 17 March 2019

* Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-christchurch-massacre-and-the-white-power-movement

Excerpt: As a historian of the earlier white power movement, I often wish for the kind of sources that would allow us to see the violent underground that motivates and connects these activists. They are hardly ever available in real time. Indeed, in the earlier period, the underground is visible only through 1996, when government response to the Oklahoma City bombing pushed such action further underground.

But the archive makes inescapably clear that in that earlier period, white power activists paired public-facing events like marches and rallies with violent underground machinations and cell-style terror that delivered a wave of attacks and bombings around the United States and the spectacularly destructive 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. That attack killed 168 people, the largest deliberate mass casualty event on the U.S. mainland between Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001—and yet we still have a popular understanding of that event as the work of one or a few actors. It wasn't. It represented the result of years of organizing, shaped by a social movement and carried out by people with deep ties—both social and ideological—to that movement.

The white power movement was profoundly transnational, motivated by ideas that have long roots in the United States and elsewhere but not bounded by nation. As with many transnational movements, white power was both shaped by inflows from other places—like skinhead culture from Great Britain—and exported a specific white power ideology, shaped by U.S. paramilitarism, abroad. Groups like Aryan Nations sent their materials around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and activists in Australia and New Zealand could read white power newspapers from the United States and send for materials. White power groups like Wotansvolk and the World Church of the Creator even set up chapters and memberships in other countries. Wotansvolk had representation in forty-one countries by 2000, and World Church of the Creator had chapters in a multitude of places including New Zealand, Canada, Norway, and South Africa. The language and strategy of white power also spread through books like The Turner Diaries, a novel-turned-manual-turned-lodestar that appeared in places like Apartheid South Africa and sold more than 500,000 copies in the few decades after it was released. The places white power activists chose to pollinate map onto an idea of whiteness that transcends national boundaries.

This transnationalism is part of why I argue for calling this "white power" rather than white nationalism. The nation in white nationalism is not the United States or New Zealand, but rather the Aryan nation.