Keith Woods: Nationalism vs. Neo-Nazism

Greg Conte = Comedy gold! pic.twitter.com/10SyDDFcLU

— The Colin Liddell (@cbliddell) February 17, 2023

Keith Woods has written another fantastic article on “NS.”

Keith Woods:

“I wasn’t planning to do a follow-up to my article on national socialism. But then I wasn’t expecting it to spark so much discussion. There was a series of essay responses which went into far more depth than my original did, there were also a lot of attacks on me from the circles I was critiquing that mostly avoided my actual arguments. I’m not really interested in becoming the anti-NS guy, but so much discussion was sparked by this that I’ve concluded I need to do a follow-up piece surveying the discussion and giving my own thoughts.

My original piece was intentionally succinct and avoided getting into the weeds of historical arguments, so I will use this to dump all the context left out of the first piece and present some of the other contributions I found interesting. …

My response is that I have been nine years making content in these circles, hardly ever raising my issues with NS. If you read my article, you will see it began as a response to Joel Davis arguing that our movement must rehabilitate NS. People can believe what they want about the Second World War. What I resent, and what I will push back against, is them telling our people that they must all focus their struggle on their history hang-up or else whatever they’re doing politically is worthless. …”

I have some more thoughts of my own.

I keep hearing from the “NS” crowd that the movement is divided between reactionaries and revolutionaries. The “NS” fandom likes to style itself as “revolutionary.” Those of us who prefer to engage in political activity in the present, who support Trump and who are inspired by American sources are characterized as “reactionaries” who want to return the status quo ante.

What is a reactionary?

Britannica:

“The American sociologist Lewis M. Killian advanced still another typology based on the direction of the change advocated or opposed. A reactionary movement advocates the restoration of a previous state of social affairs, while a progressive movement argues for a new social arrangement. A conservative movement opposes the changes proposed by other movements, or those seeming to develop through cultural drift, and advocates preservation of existing values and norms. …”

Mark Lilla, the author of The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, has the best definition.

New York Times:

“We live in a reactionary age. Revolutionaries traffic in hope. They believe, and wish others to believe, that a radical break with the past is possible and that it will inaugurate a new era of human experience. Reactionaries believe that such a break has already occurred and has been disastrous. While to the untrained eye the river of time seems to flow as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. The revolutionary sees the radiant future, and it electrifies him. The reactionary thinks of the past in all its splendor, and he, too, is electrified. He is, he thinks, the guardian of what actually happened, not the prophet of what might be. This explains the strangely exhilarating despair that courses through reactionary literature and political rhetoric, the palpable sense of mission. As the editors of the right-leaning magazine National Review put it in its very first issue, the mission is to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Reactionaries are not conservatives. This is the first thing to be understood about them. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for. The healthiest way to bring about change, the conservative believes, is through consultation and slow transformations in custom and tradition, not by announcing bold reform programs or inventing supposedly inalienable individual rights. But the conservative is also reconciled to the fact that history never stands still and that we are only passing through. Conservatism seeks to instill the humble thought that history moves us forward, not the other way around. And that radical attempts to master it through sheer will bring disaster.

Reactionaries reject this conservative outlook. They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as destructive. Reactionary stories always begin with a happy, well-ordered state where people willingly shared a common destiny. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals and outsiders — writers, journalists, professors, foreigners — undermined that harmony. (The betrayal of elites is central to every reactionary myth.) Soon the entire society, even the common people, were taken in. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways — the reactionaries themselves — see what happened. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its ultimate doom depends entirely on their resistance. …”

Essentially, a reactionary is someone who as Mark Lilla says believes there was once a Golden Age, but who now sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. The reactionary is someone who is inspired by a previous state of affairs and who desires to return to it and believes that is possible. The reactionary is someone who is focused on “telling the truth” about what actually happened. The reactionary is someone who is deeply opposed to social changes and wants to overturn those changes.

There is no more reactionary scene in all of American politics than the “NS” fandom. Their lost Golden Age is the Third Reich which was ruined by the Allies in World War II. Their nostalgia for the past is so strong that they create fake political parties which do not engage in political activity, issue membership cards and dress up in period costumes like the NSDAP. They are crypt keepers who are focused on “telling the truth” about what actually happened in World War II and the Holocaust. It appeals to history nerds who write 3,000 and 12,000 word candlelight vigil essays about Hitler and National Socialism. It appeals only to people who are deeply alienated from the present and who take refuge in the past.

As I have explained in Loser Pilled, the “NS” fandom is distinct in all kinds of ways from historic National Socialism. Adolf Hitler was a talented politician who engaged in political activity. The historic NSDAP was the political vehicle of a faction in Germany that contested and won state power. The historical National Socialists were not driven by incurable nostalgia for a defunct foreign regime. They were not trying to be edgy. Their program was based on addressing contemporary political problems like economic collapse and hyperinflation and grievances like Germany’s territorial losses after World War II. Hitler had his own thoughts about geopolitics which were inspired by the blockade in World War I. The original act was nothing like the fandom that has grown up around it. National Socialism was not a reactionary movement attempting to return to a Golden Age. It is the fans who are all foreigners and reactionaries.

It goes without saying that reactionaries come in all colors and stripes, but I don’t know of anyone else who is so deeply committed to playing the part. In the Southern heritage community, there are Confederate reenactors who are nostalgic for the Confederacy who get together and reenact battles like Gettysburg and who memorize the minutiae of Civil War campaigns and battles. There are people who are “telling the truth” about Lincoln and what really happened in the Civil War. For the most part though, these people do not identify as “Confederates” and would say they love Southern heritage. No one gets totally lost in the sauce of history and adopts the identity of a “Nazi” like “NS” fans who forget it is a LARP.

Confederate reenactors take off their uniforms, meet up at Denny’s or Outback Steakhouse after their LARPs and return to their suburban families and office jobs. These … people … do … not.

Here are some key differences between Southern Nationalism and the “NS” fandom:

• Southern Nationalism is based on the unique Anglo-Celtic cultural and historical experience in the American South. No one debates whether “Neo-Confederate ideology” can or should be exported to foreign countries. A German Klansman or a Russian “Confederate” is a joke
• Most Southern Nationalists would agree that it is neither possible or desirable to restore racial chattel slavery and the plantation complex in the 21st century
• Most Southern Nationalists would agree the Jeffersonian agrarian dream is long dead in the 21st century. Few Southerners work in agriculture on family farms
• Most Southern Nationalists would agree that industrialization and urbanization are irreversible
• Most Southern Nationalists are the descendants of Confederate veterans and admire and want to defend their own heritage. They are not latching on to a foreign regime
• I’ve never once seen a Southern Nationalists argue that, say, the case for Irish Nationalism or Polish Nationalism in the 21st century turns on vindicating Southern slavery
• No one in Southern Nationalism says things like “Jefferson Davis save us”
• No one in Southern Nationalism argues that it is the only legitimate form of nationalism or somehow indispensable to other nationalist movements
• Most Southern Nationalists recognize that American demographics are more complicated after 20th century migration. The DamnYankee isn’t blamed for everything
• If anything is true, Southern Nationalist organizations are guilty of being too accommodating of non-Southerners and going too far in the big tent “pro-White” direction
• I’ve never heard anyone in Southern Nationalism claim that Confederate ideology was perfect
• Southern Nationalists generally don’t argue over the finer points of Confederate ideology like, say, Robert Barnwell Rhett’s ideal of Free Government
• Southern Nationalists are critical of Confederate military leaders like Longstreet or Bragg
• Southern Nationalists recognize that the Confederacy was only four years of Southern history
• Jews had little to do with the War Between the States and went along with slavery and secession. It was a conflict between evangelical Protestants on both sides of the war.

Southern Nationalism is a generic ethnonationalist movement inspired by reactionary nostalgia. What matters to Southern Nationalists is preserving Southerners as a race, people and culture in our own times, reversing a generation of deracination, not relitigating the Civil War.

It is similar to people in Scotland who want to be independent from the United Kingdom. It is taken for granted that the historic Confederacy isn’t coming back, the war was lost and its leaders are dead. Southern Nationalists don’t dress in period costumes and identify as “Confederates” like the “NS” fandom. You could place “Neo-Confederacy” on the reactionary spectrum along with other modern secessionist movements, but it is not at the polar end of the spectrum like the “NS” fandom.

In spite of their self-image, there is nothing “revolutionary” about the “NS” fandom. It is more deeply attached to history and nostalgia than other nationalist movements motivated by reactionary nostalgia. It is a fandom or a subculture that strongly rejects engaging in political activity. Texas Nationalists, for example, are active in state politics. Southern Nationalists have supporters in Congress who sympathize with a National Divorce. I’ve seen candidates for state offices speak at our events. Hitler is a godlike figure in the “NS” fandom that has no real parallel among other reactionary subcultures.

Keith makes an important point here about the reactionary “NS” subculture:

“Modern NS is backward looking and recycles aesthetics that are a century old. For decades, the NS subculture has attracted the dregs of White society. …

The NS subculture is associated with criminality and misanthropy not just because of Jewish media representation, but the actual history of these movements. Why is that? Is it just because the system fears NS so much that it is bound to only attract people with little to lose? Partly. But it’s also true that identifying as NS today is analogous to identifying as a satanist in a Christian society. It’s no surprise then that it attracts the same anti-social types that were attracted to satanism in previous decades, and there is even a crossover between some NS subcultures and satanism, as well as other extreme anti-social subcultures like people who celebrate mass-shooters. …”

Insofar as “NS” does become “revolutionary,” the result is always sporadic acts of wignat crime and violence. There are other reactionary subcultures on the far right, but you don’t hear about Trad Cath mass shooters. There is no overlap between Trad Caths or Neo-Confederates and Satanism.

The SPLC has a timely new article on the Brandon Russell trial and something called “Terrorgram” which I understand is part of the wignat subculture on Telegram. The author, Hannah Gais, jokes that people like this – Atomwaffen, Order of Nine Angles types – are who keep her in business.

I think the final word on this subject should be left to Hitler himself. He never envisioned this morbid postwar fandom scattered across the world. He never asked to be associated with it.

“Russell, 29, was found guilty on Feb. 3 of conspiring to damage an energy facility, after a six-day trial at a federal court in Baltimore. A mostly white jury deliberated for less than an hour before reaching a verdict.

Over the course of the trial, part of which Hatewatch attended, prosecutors presented voluminous evidence confirming Russell as a central figure within “Terrorgram,” a neo-Nazi collective that the U.S. Department of State named a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group in July. “Terrorgram” refers to a loosely organized network of chats on the messaging app Telegram, where neo-Nazis shared instructions for making bombs and 3D-printed weapons, glorified white supremacist terrorists as “saints,” and plotted attacks on infrastructure, minorities, public figures and politicians. …

Since then, Atomwaffen Division members have been linked to five murders, in addition to various harassment plots and weapons or explosives charges. This included Russell, whom authorities arrested and later incarcerated on explosives-related charges in Florida in 2017. Upon his release from prison in 2021, Russell continued living in Florida and became involved with Terrorgram. …

In chats shown at trial, Russell appeared to present himself as a recruiter for the National Socialist Resistance Front (NSRF). Ryan Hatfield, a former Atomwaffen Division cell leader, founded NSRF under a different name in 2020.

Though significantly smaller than Atomwaffen Division at its peak, NSRF used similar aesthetics, blending World War II-era Nazi imagery with hyper-stylized footage of paramilitary trainings. …”

This stuff is a perennial feature of the subculture going back to Charles Manson.

Actually, it is not vital to the success of White advocacy and nationalism in Europe and America in the 21st century – the optics of period costumes, the “leaders” of these groups, the history effort posts, the criminality, the federal attention magnet, the lawsuits, all the baggage of mid-20th century German foreign policy, arguing over who did what in World War II, the sociopaths, losers and attention seekers drawn to it, the monomaniacal obsession with issues Americans do not care about and their “strategy” of attacking White people and Christians and losing at politics to empower our enemies.

I had a front row to the impact the “Nationalist Front” had on Southern nationalism. I watched the oxygen leave the room whenever we did anything with these groups. Anyone who was not deeply immersed in “NS” subculture was repelled by it. There was no benefit whatsoever to associating with people who form human swastikas at police helicopters. Normal people have no interest in their program.