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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF NEO-NAZI EDGELORDS  
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Jordan S. Carroll
October 9, 2024
The Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book is a history of the far right wing movement in the United
States, told in the form of a political biography of neo-Nazi author
and activist James Mason. _

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_Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism The Origins and
Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege_
Spencer Sunshine
Routledge
ISBN: 9780367190606

SPENCER SUNSHINE’S _Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism:
The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s _Siege (2024) offers a
brilliant account of the contemporary Far Right’s evolution told
through the political biography of neo-Nazi author and activist James
Mason. Sunshine succeeds in illuminating important but understudied
aspects of neo-Nazi history by drawing upon Mason’s archived
correspondence even as he offers useful lessons for responding to
fascism in our contemporary moment. Through an analysis of Mason’s
infamous newsletter _Siege_, Sunshine examines Mason’s role in
developing two strategies that have become central to the Far Right:
accelerationist terrorism and countercultural subversion. While
specialists will look to this book for careful work detailing neo-Nazi
sectarianism, general readers will find a compelling genealogy of the
Far Right that helps us understand its actions in order to counteract
them.

Sunshine first traces the trajectory of the neo-Nazi movement through
Mason’s peripatetic political career, which began with his
membership in George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.
Rockwell implemented a strategy of mass persuasion that concentrated
on winning white people over to the organization via uniformed
demonstrations calculated to attract media coverage through their
shocking use of the swastika and other Nazi iconography. The American
Nazi Party stood out from other white supremacist political outfits in
the 1960s as one of the few willing to break the taboo on outright
Hitler worship. The party also had the advantage of Rockwell’s
charismatic leadership, but his assassination in 1967 left the
neo-Nazi movement without someone capable of holding it together—the
fascists quickly splintered into an array of largely ineffectual
micro-sects, many with their own wannabe führers and fussy dress
regulations.

In the 1970s, Mason joined the National Socialist Liberation Front
(NSLF), which turned away from the mass strategy to focus instead on
guerilla warfare. As Sunshine shows, the NSLF adopted some of its
rhetoric and tactics from militant approaches used by (nominally)
leftist groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather
Underground. Sunshine even suggests that NSLF founder Joseph Tommasi
may have borrowed the title for what would become Mason’s neo-Nazi
newsletter—_Siege_—from Norman Mailer’s _Miami and the Siege of
Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic
Conventions of 1968 _(1968), an account of the anti-war protests at
the presidential conventions that year. The NSLF, along with many
other far-right extremist groups during this period, rejected
conservative reformism and embraced instead a revolutionary ideology
calling for the overthrow of the state through terrorist violence.
These neo-Nazi groups also relaxed the faux-military discipline
associated with the American Nazi Party and its would-be successors,
allowing members to take drugs and grow their hair out.

With the neo-Nazis embroiled in sectarian splitting despite efforts to
unite the right, Mason grew skeptical about the possibility of
achieving his racist and antisemitic goals through organized guerrilla
war. As Sunshine demonstrates, although the neo-Nazi movement often
deployed violence for political purposes, it was also plagued by bouts
of gratuitous violence unconnected to any strategic goal. Many members
of neo-Nazi organizations were antisocial individuals with criminal or
otherwise troubled backgrounds who were prone to fighting in general,
and Mason tapped into this murderous impulse in _Siege_ in the 1980s.
He praised serial killers and mass shooters he associated with the
movement’s ideology, but he also celebrated all random violence as a
way of disrupting what he considered to be the Jewish-controlled
system. Mason thus became a forebear of right-wing accelerationism,
which seeks to hasten societal collapse by fomenting racial conflict
through terrorist attacks. The white ethnostate, such accelerationists
claim, can only be built among the current system’s ruins.

Sunshine makes the useful point that Mason’s ideology—and, indeed,
the entire neo-Nazi movement—evolved in response to defeat.
Neo-Nazism’s genocidal revolution never arrived, and the movement
remained fragmented and unpopular. Many neo-Nazis dealt with this
problem by developing increasingly extreme methods of contestation
that didn’t require organization or persuasion of the recalcitrant
white masses, a rearguard move that was often accompanied by a retreat
into the theoretical elaboration of neo-Nazi doctrine. In some sense,
this sounds like a lot like the alt-right’s story: disaffected with
neoconservatism and neoliberalism, the alt-right attempted to build a
mass movement using protest and propaganda but largely lost momentum
due to internal dissension and external resistance. Following this
setback, some white nationalists rejected “optics” and began to
encourage or perpetrate murderous attacks such as the mass shootings
in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas.

Mason’s penchant for violence also led him to his most notorious
obsession, Charles Manson. Mason believed prosecutor Vincent
Bugliosi’s argument that the Manson family hoped to ignite a race
war, and Mason came to idolize Manson as the new Hitler who could save
the white race. Sunshine shows that Manson, who once carved a swastika
into his forehead, treated Mason as his new disciple and offered him
political and spiritual guidance from prison. Many contemporary
members of the neo-Nazi movement loathed this new turn in Mason’s
politics, but his _Siege _writings came to inspire violent fascists
including terrorist groups such as the Atomwaffen Division in the 21st
century. “Read _Siege_” became an oft-repeated injunction on the
far right.

But how did Mason’s _Siege_—an obscure, self-published periodical
that probably never reached more than a hundred readers when it ceased
publication in 1986—become a viral hate manifesto three decades
later? The final section of Sunshine’s book answers this question by
tracing how a group rooted in underground subcultures such as
industrial music and LaVeyen Satanism kept Mason’s thought alive by
republishing and referencing his writing. This social circle, which he
calls the Abraxas Clique, centered on musician Boyd Rice, Feral House
publisher Adam Parfrey, author Michael Moynihan, and occultist Nikolas
Schreck. At some moments, the Abraxas Clique presented Manson, Mason,
and Hitler as ambiguous or ironic cultural signifiers designed to
shock or provoke. Members of the Abraxas Clique were often willing to
entertain controversial ideas—Parfrey promoted eugenics, Rice called
for mass murder—but they stopped short of publicly identifying as
neo-Nazis. But Sunshine reveals that key figures such as Rice,
Parfrey, and Moynihan were less circumspect in private, sending
fawning letters to Mason that seemed to express sympathy with his
poisonous ideology. From Milo Yiannopoulos to Stephen Miller, we’ve
seen this pattern of public disavowal and private affinity many times
in the history of contemporary fascism.

Over the years, there have been many debates about what each member of
the Abraxas Clique felt in their heart of hearts. It’s a very
Protestant way of thinking about politics: you’re only a true
believer if your external profession of belief is matched by authentic
inner faith. Sunshine’s history might provide another way of
thinking that doesn’t get caught up in such individualist
psychodrama. What was important about the Abraxas Clique was that it
connected people to Mason and his writings. Mason wasn’t especially
concerned with the depth or sincerity of Abraxas beliefs so long as
the group circulated his work and introduced him to new potential
recruits. As Sunshine shows, Mason himself got his start in neo-Nazism
when he read the address for the American Nazi Party on a banner in a
photograph on the cover of an ostensibly well-meaning exposé. In what
might be termed the citational politics of fascism, these linkages
matter more than intentions. Ironic or not, the Abraxas Clique built a
new network for Mason that he could not have created on his own.

Indeed, subsequent history has shown that, frequently, it’s the
fence-sitters, provocateurs, and other bad faith actors who extend the
fascist network to individuals or communities that wouldn’t
otherwise encounter right-wing extremism. Ambivalence can even be a
virtue in the role of fascist proselytizer. Many who wouldn’t bother
listening to a convinced neo-Nazi will entertain someone who’s just
making jokes or asking questions even if it leads them down the path
toward white nationalism. Thanks to the internet, fascists no longer
need to worry as much about recruits finding their contact
information, but they do have to make themselves legible to algorithms
and salient to popular conversations. People peripheral to the fascist
network prove to be central to its expansion in these moments.
Vampires always need someone at the threshold to invite them into
places where they haven’t been.

The _Siege_ case also shows us how flexible fascism can be. Neo-Nazism
begins to look less like a personal creed with specific tenets and
more like a reactionary structure of thought that changes based on
context. Wherever someone imagines that life is a biological struggle
for survival, hierarchy is rooted in nature, and the world is divided
between creative elites and disposable subhumans, something like
neo-Nazism is almost certainly quick to follow. One of Mason’s
innovations was to rebrand neo-Nazism as the Universal Order, an
abstract concept that allowed him to tolerate a great deal of
ideological and even ethnic diversity in people willing to further his
genocidal cause. Sunshine reveals how neo-Nazism adorned itself with
the generalized misanthropy characteristic of the extreme subcultures
of the 1990s, an important lesson to remember in the modern moment as
fascism reclothes itself as transphobia and religious chauvinism.

Sunshine’s study points the way toward several other avenues of
exploration. Although Sunshine offers us the definitive history of
neo-Nazi edgelords, we have yet to fully explore the other dominant
aesthetic on the far right: fascist sentimentalism. We catch a glimpse
of this when Sunshine quotes a neo-Nazi who claims to fight for a
world without loneliness. Seyward Darby has shed light on
“tradwives,” who trade in bucolic images of white homemakers, but
there is still work to be done on contemporary fascism’s obsessions
with genres such as the pastoral or melodrama, its love for kitsch and
cuteness, its middlebrow enthusiasm for morally edifying culture, and
its weepy professions of brotherhood and friendship. Transgression is
only one mask fascism wears when it goes out.

But there is also more to say about Sunshine’s subjects. Because
Sunshine’s study devotes itself to bringing clarity to questions
about who said what to whom, correctly avoiding the murky questions of
meaning that have often clouded the Abraxas Clique’s political
project. It’s true that indeterminacy can become a trap here.
Fascist obfuscation calls for a strategic literalism that refuses to
play interpretive games with neo-Nazis or their fellow travelers. But
the thorny problem of reception still matters to me, as a critic and
someone who brushed up against this subculture in the 1990s. In my
adolescence, I listened to industrial music, read up on Manson, and
purchased occult books including Anton LaVey’s _The Satanic Bible
_(1969). I acquired a copy of Parfrey’s notorious 1987 anthology
_Apocalypse Culture_—which includes material from Mason—but I
found the collection too repulsive and disturbing to read cover to
cover. Later, I would read Moynihan’s _Lords of Chaos:_ _The Bloody
Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground_, co-authored with Didrik
Søderlind and published by Feral House, on Scandinavian black metal
and its extensive involvement with white nationalism. If someone had
asked, I probably would have guessed that most people in this cultural
milieu hated fascism as much as I did.

Of course, I would have arrived at that conclusion partly through
naivete and ignorance—these were the passing interests of an
isolated teenager before everything could be googled—but the Abraxas
Clique’s cultural production also allowed itself to be read this
way. The Far Right frequently exploits ideological indeterminacy. As I
argue in _Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right_,
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fascists turn cultural critiques of their ideology into affirmations
of it. Anti-fascist texts like Alan Moore’s _Watchmen_ (1986–87)
and Paul Verhoeven’s _Starship Troopers_ (1997) expose how the
audience’s favorite genres have proven to be complicit with
reactionary thought and feeling, but they do so to expose and
eradicate those sentiments. Alt-right readers ignore the last part
where fascism is banished. Instead, they argue that superheroes and
space explorers are fascist by nature—and therefore should be
celebrated. This is an old problem: the 1982 film _Pink Floyd: The
Wall_ warned that the rock-star celebrity could become a right-wing
dictator wielding hammers against his enemies; the neo-Nazi
Hammerskins embraced this image as their symbol.

But the scenes detailed in Sunshine’s book seem to hold a somewhat
different cultural politics rooted in horror. The revelation of the
audience’s secret yearning for authoritarianism turns out to be
sublime or terrible depending on whether the interpreter is fascist or
anti-fascist. I always assumed Parfrey’s _Apocalypse Culture _was
meant to be read with fear and disgust, but any horror scholar knows
that the genre frequently provides a surreptitious way to fulfill
desires censored by the dominant culture. Presented amid
representations of serial killing and self-mutilation, the neo-Nazi
content in _Apocalypse Culture_ can be interpreted as either a symptom
of or a cure for the depravity displayed in the rest of the book,
depending on one’s political prejudices. It is fitting, then, that
this milieu’s patron saint is Manson, the evil decoder who glossed
love as hate and read racist prophecies into the Beatles’ White
Album (1968). White nationalists have become masters at subversive
reading.

None of this is to say that these genres are synonymous with fascism.
As industrial music critic S. Alexander Reed has pointed out, the
genre has produced acts that diagnose, détourn, and defuse fascist
fantasies, as well as musicians, that straight-out endorse or exploit
them. Black metal has yielded ethnically diverse and progressive bands
such as Zeal & Ardor as well as murderous white supremacists like
Burzum, Satanic occultists remain wildly divergent in their political
commitments, and horror media boasts a strong and long-lived
anti-fascist tendency exemplified in recent years by Jeremy
Saulnier’s film _Green Room _(2015) and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s
novel _Manhunt _(2022).

At the same time, we should move beyond the banal observation that
anything can signify anything. Instead, we must attend to white
supremacy’s power to warp meaning. Reading like a fascist is not an
individual error. Our society is so pervaded by racial violence and
domination that it magnetizes meaning to the far right. If a fascist
reading or misreading of a text is possible, someone will exploit it.
Under these conditions, a parodic or figurative fascism quickly
becomes a symbol of sincere fascism. As Sunshine proves, neo-Nazis and
the edgelords who love them stand ready to take advantage of this
predicament.

 

Jordan S. Carroll is the author of _Reading the Obscene:
Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US
Literature _(Stanford University Press, 2021) and _Speculative
Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right _(University of
Minnesota Press, 2024).

* neo-nazism
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* far right
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* The American Far Right
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