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Overview
Gods of the Blood details the trends that have converged to fuel militant paganism in the United States: anti-government sentiments inflamed by such events as Ruby Ridge and Waco, the rise of the white power music industry (including whitenoise, dark ambient, and hatecore), the extraordinary reach of modern communications technologies, and feelings of economic and cultural marginalization in the face of globalization and increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the American population. Gardell elucidates how racist pagan beliefs are formed out of various combinations of conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, warrior ideology, populism, beliefs in racial separatism, Klandom, skinhead culture, and tenets of national socialism. He shows how these convictions are further animated by an array of thought selectively derived from thinkers including Nietzche, historian Oswald Spengler, Carl Jung, and racist mystics. Scrupulously attentive to the complexities of racist paganism as it is lived and practiced, Gods of the Blood is a fascinating, disturbing, and important portrait of the virulent undercurrents of certain kinds of violence in America today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822384502 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Mattias Gardell is Associate Professor in the History of Religions at Stockholm University. He is the author of In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam, published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Gods of the blood
The pagan revival and white separatismBy Mattias Gardell
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3071-7
Chapter One
The Transforming Landscapes of American Racism
During the past few decades, the phenomenon of racism has undergone dramatic transformations in public perception, from state-sanctioned ideology with a significant presence in American society to its current standing as an unjust worldview cast on the dump heap of obsolete ideas-a change that has left its subscribers in a state of desperation and confusion. How did white supremacy, long considered to reflect scientific truth, manifest destiny, and the will of God, suddenly lose its grip not only on American society but throughout most of the now decolonized world as well?
The Alchemy of Race and Nation
Racism is a mode of social classification that determines who is who, who deserves what, who properly belongs where and does what; as such, it is inalienably linked to power. From its inception, the United States of America classified the inhabitants populating its territory of jurisdiction on the basis of race. At the time of the American Revolution, persons of European, African, and American Indian ancestry populated the colonies, but when Congress in 1790 restricted U.S. citizenship to "free white persons," they effectively defined the new American "nation" as "white." Inhabitants of African ancestry, who accounted for almost 20 percent of the population atthe time of the Revolution, were excluded from the freedoms awarded white Americans, as were American Indians, who, the argument ran, had no lawful claim to their native land. A full half of the territory recognized as the United States in the Treaty of Paris, 1783, consisted of Native American land, the expropriation of which was sanctioned by biblical and natural law. Judicial theoretician Emerich de Vattel formulated the standard notion of vacuum domicilium. Linking possession with productivity, de Vattel claimed that only those who met the obligation to cultivate the earth were entitled to own land (Stephanson 1995, 25). Where reality offered settled agricultural Native American cultures like the Iroquois or the literate Cherokee, the spread of civilization found other means of removing the annoyance. "Treaties with Indians," the governor of Georgia stated, "were expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced without bloodshed to yield up what civilized people had the right to possess" (ibid., 26). In 1830 President Andrew Jackson secured the Indian Removal Act, granting the President authority to remove "civilized" Native Americans such as the Cherokee of Georgia and the Creek of Alabama by force.
If Native Americans were classified as savages associated with wild nature, Africans were associated with domesticated nature as beasts of the field. They were "property not persons," defined according to the original Constitution as "three-fifths of a man." Slavery constituted, in effect, the first melting pot in U.S. history, unifying as it did Africans of different languages and cultures into a single, "inferior" race. In the late seventeenth century emerged the first systematic efforts to link black physical features with inferior mental qualities, beginning as a theological reflection designed to harmonize the facts of divine justice with the practice of slavery. "Blackness" was associated with the realm of evil, and black skin was interpreted as a divine curse that marked the descendants of original sinners Cain and/or Ham and Canaan. So pervasive was the merging of moral quality with complexion that a good black man was said to have a white soul.
As time went on, various biological and anthropological theories contributed to the "scientific" construction of racism that became an integral part of U.S. society. Americans of African ancestry came to be considered "by nature" lazier, more prone to play and amoral sexuality, and less intelligent, less civilized, and less fit for self-government than white men. Defenders of slavery such as Secretary of State John C. Calhoun seized on scientific reports in rebutting the prospects of abolition as "neither human [n]or wise" (quoted in Stanton 1960, 61). Deprived of the "guardian care of his owner," the logic went, a black man would inevitably sink back into the state of idiocy that follows from his "inferior condition," while blacks in bondage "improved" in "comfort, intelligence, and morals" (ibid.). Emancipation would also, Calhoun reasoned, unleash a devastating race war on the new continent, as the two races could not coexist harmoniously in the land of the free. The latter argument was also voiced by a majority of the abolitionists, whose plans to end slavery were generally accompanied by schemes to remove emancipated blacks from the free white republic, either by repatriation, exportation, or systematic curtailment of their rights. With free blacks believed to pose a greater danger than blacks in bondage, racism grew in intensity following the emancipation.
According to the first U.S. system of demographic classification, the inhabitants of the U.S. territory constituted three distinct categories: Americans were white, free, and belonged to civilized world; Africans were black, bonded, and belonged at the plantation; Amerindians were red, wild, and belonged in nature. When Congress passed the first Immigration and Naturalization Act, only free white persons were considered fit for self-government. But who was to qualify as "white"? To the modern reader, the question might seem odd and the answer given, at least in approximate popular usage of the term. But, far from being given by nature, "whiteness" is a result of context and negotiation. Throughout U.S. history, whiteness has determined status and power in society and has been linked to the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. The contest over whiteness-who is white and who is not-has therefore always been a salient feature of U.S. history. The Founding Fathers appear to have equated "white" with "Anglo-Saxon," not foreseeing that, in the nineteenth century, millions of non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants would seek entry into the American nation by referring to their whiteness.
Benjamin Franklin argued that "Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, [Germans], and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion," and he wished for an increase of the "purely white" population, the "Saxon" and the "English" (quoted in Jacobson 1998, 40). Thomas Jefferson shared a then popular notion that Anglo-Saxon England had been a land of free and heroic yeoman farmers whose social and political system had been destroyed in the Norman Conquest of 1066. By separating from Britain, the American revolutionaries cleared society of Norman corruptions, such as monarchy, nobility, the state church, and feudalism, and emulated the system of their freedom-loving tribal ancestors (Horsman 1981, 18-23). Jefferson's ideal vision of micro-republics of about six square miles, each with its own direct democracy, school, militia, local police force, and responsibility for the welfare of the poor, old, and disabled, was modeled on his perception of the Anglo-Saxon "natural constitution" and is echoed among modern Norse pagans in their call for reverting society to the "tribal socialism" of their pagan ancestors. Although Jefferson's radical decentralism never materialized, Anglo-Saxon romanticism prevailed, strengthened by novelists such as Ivanhoe author Sir Walter Scott, and was soon to become racialized in the conflict with waves of immigrants from Catholic Europe.
Immigration increased dramatically between the 1820s and 1850s, from a low of between 6,000 and 10,000 per year in the early 1820s to 60,000 in 1832 to 380,000 in 1851. Many of the new immigrants were Catholics from Germany and Ireland. The Irish alone accounted for one-third of all immigrants in the 1830s. Following the Irish potato famine of 1845-51, close to two million people fled Ireland, many of whom headed to the United States. In 1851 alone a quarter million Irishmen arrived in the United States, seeking naturalization as "free white persons" to the consternation of Anglo-Americans. The anti-Catholic sentiment prevalent in Protestant America forcibly came to the fore, both spontaneously and in organized nativist movements. Anti-Catholic newspapers such as the American Protestant Vindicator mushroomed in major eastern cities. Alarmist conspiracy theories told of a secret Catholic plan to subvert the new nation's freedom and deliver the continent to the Vatican.
At the same time, a series of "confession" books by "former nuns" told of sadomasochistic rituals behind the convent walls in which decent young Protestant females were brutalized by Catholic priests, nuns, and monks. The Awful Disclosure of Maria Monk (1836) used such graphic language that versions of it appeared in adult bookstores a century later. It became the best-selling book in American history until the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Bennet 1995, 42). Conspiracy theories spiced with tales of ritualized sexual assault are still popular in American culture although the perpetrators of today are not necessarily Catholics but Illuminati, Satanists, globalists, or aliens. Analyzing the genre's popularity in the eighteenth century, David Bennet argues, "Women's role as moral authority was accentuated in an age of socioeconomic upheaval, when national values were under pressure and traditional relationships threatened.... Women, invested with moral authority, were pictured as abused, degraded, and shamefully cast away by the enemy. What a heroic setting for a true patriot. How better to defend the American way. If the symbolic woman is threatened by 'them,' certainly she must be saved by 'us' in a crusade against the lustful monsters of conspiracy" (ibid., 45). Acting on circulating conspiracy theories, "Americans" assaulted Catholic priests and neighborhoods. Catholic churches were set on fire in New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Ohio, and angered Americans attacked convents in New Orleans, Galveston, Providence, and Chicago.
The notion of the "free white nation" as Anglo-Saxon in character was racialized in the 1840s, using arguments developed in the new scientific racism of anthropology and phrenology. "Americans" began to explain their unprecedented achievements in terms of their superior blood. This reasoning was fueled by developments in continental European philology that showed that Germanic languages belonged to a common Indo-European family. Assuming that language affinity meant racial affinity, researchers began to search for a common Indo-European or, as it would come to be called in the late nineteenth century, Aryan homeland.
A popularized image of Indo-Europeans as a uniquely gifted people spilling "out from the mountains of Central Asia to press westwards following the sun, bringing civilization, heroism and the principles of freedom to a succession of empires" fit perfectly into American imagination. Soon, the westernmost outpost of these Caucasians, the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon, was seen as the elite for whom the concept "Aryan" was reserved. In line with the alleged Aryan imperative of following the sun, the superior Nordic-Anglo-Saxon civilizer then crossed the Atlantic and continued westward conquering the new land (Horsman 1981, 33, 83). At the brink of the war against Mexico that eventually added all the land north of Rio Grande to the United States, the notion of the westward march of the supreme Anglo-Saxon race merged with the Puritan concept of the divine mandate, leading to the peculiar American interpretation that the conquest of North America was their manifest destiny. Democrat ideologue John O'Sullivan proclaimed in 1845 "the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government" (quoted in Stephanson 1995, 42).
The enthusiasm for the civilizing efforts of the superior Anglo-Saxon race was heightened by the unease caused by increasing non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. Racialized arguments held that immigrants from Catholic Europe would hardly qualify as "white." Irish people were described as an uncivilized, blackish, primitive, and savage "race"; like blacks, they were depicted with monkey features in newspaper cartoons. Germans were accused of swamping the nation, driving "white people" out of the labor market. Italians, Ashkenazi Jews, Slavs, and Iberians shared their fate and became less and less perceived as "white" during the late nineteenth century. The new science of anthropology told of a multitude of European "races," often defined as Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Alpine, Slav, and Mediterranean. Although thought of as a given by nature, whiteness is not an inherent quality but a social contruct; its parameters subject to context, as Matthew Frye Jacobson demonstrates in Whiteness of a Different Color. Relative to Anglo-Saxon Americans, the other European races were felt to be less white, but relative to non-European people seeking naturalization, they were considered more white-provided that they "acted white" and were not associated with blacks or other non-Europeans. To serve in the Mexican War or to confront free blacks in the South or Native Americans in the West, an Irishman would have been enlisted as white, although he would have been considered nonwhite in the Eastern cities. To some, a Japanese, relative to an African, was as good a white as a southern European or a Jew, while others argued that the latter had as poor a claim to whiteness as a Japanese (Jacobson 1998, 77). Different pressures fed the conflicting views of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and an inclusive whiteness. Informed by the new science of racial hygiene, eugenics, and by the alarmist writings of racist intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, American greatness was generally interpreted in terms of the supreme qualities of the Nordic (white) race, which ostensibly faced threats from both the inside and outside. According to this perspective, the inside threats arose from the processes of industrialization and urbanization, which seemed to favor an increase of the inferior elements of the racial stock-the criminals, idiots, disabled, alcoholics, and lowlifes-at the expense of those considered "hereditary worthy." Through legislation, education, and sterilization programs, the applied eugenics movement aimed to improve racial stock by promoting the procreation of the superior elements and reducing the reproduction of the inferior elements. In 1907, Indiana passed the first sterilization act in the United States; others were soon enacted by several states in the North and West. Marriage restrictions were applied to the "feebleminded" in a majority of states, and thirty-two states prohibited biracial marriage and sexual intercourse. The achievements of the American eugenics programs came to serve as a model for their European counterparts, including in national socialist Germany. In fact, the American Rockefeller Foundation funded German eugenic research even after the national socialists gained control of German science (Kuhl 1994, 13-21).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: Globalization, Nationalism, and the Pagan Revival 1
1. The Transforming Landscapes of American Racism 33
2. The Smorgasbord of the Revolutionary White-Racist Counterculture 67
3. The Pagan Revival
137
4. Wolf-Age Pagans: The Odinist Call of Aryan Revolutionary Paganism 165
5. By the Spear of Odin: The Rise of Wotansvolk
191
6. Ethnic Asatru 258
7. Hail Loki! Hail Satan! Hail Hitler! Darkside Asatru, Satanism, and Occult National Socialism 284
8. Globalization, Aryan Paganism, and Romantic Men with Guns 324
Notes 345
Works Cited 399
Index 431