Fundamentalism=Fascism?

FASCISM


Roger Griffin


DRAFT of an article to be published in Brenda Brasher (ed.), Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism (Berkshire Reference Works, Massachusetts, 2002)




Readers should be aware that in the various processes involved between the writing and the final processing of the document for web use, some corruption has occurred. For example the symbol > occurs where there should be a " and the same is true of the symbol = when a quotation ends. The other major occurrence of the wrong symbol is again = which also represents an apostrophe.

Fascism: a form of secular politics born of the convulsions of modernity whose belief in the nation or race rather than God's Word as the foundation of reality makes it in theory the antithesis of fundamentalism. Yet in practice a number of fascism=s manifestations have exhibited a striking, if ultimately spurious, resemblance to movements and regimes based on fundamentalist forms of religion. Moreover, some political phenomena in Israel, India and the contemporary USA demonstrate how the two can become inextricably bound up with each other to a point where a genuine hybrid seems to occur, defying neat categorization. The potential for a superficial affinity and even substantive kinship existing between the two phenomena resides in their shared urge to put an end to the radical pluralism of values and lack of faith characteristic of >modern= life in secular, >Westernized= societies and in their conviction that the (perceived) decadence of the contemporary world is destined to give way to a comprehensive rebirth or >palingenesis=. This is a Biblical term (see John, Ch. 3, Verse 7), which derives from the Greek palin (again) and genesis (birth), and has been used to describe religious, biological, and socio-political transformations. In times of acute social crises palingenetic myths which present the contemporary period of (perceived) decay and disintegration as about to give way to a new era, a new order, and a new man naturally can come to exert considerable appeal once modernization is felt to be eroding the (imagined) homogeneity of many >traditional= religious and national communities. Paradoxically, the origins of both fascism and fundamentalism in intransigent resistance to the decay of >traditional= communities bound together by unquestioned beliefs and certainties makes them both manifestations of the modernity against which they rebel.

Parallels and distinctions between fascism and fundamentalism

The relationship of fascism to fundamentalism is likely to remain a highly contentious subject because of the inability of experts in the social sciences to arrive at a consensus about the precise meaning of either term. Certainly protagonists of movements would nowadays tend to dissociate themselves from both terms since they have both acquired deeply pejorative connotations of fanaticsm, hatred, and violence in common usage. While some scholars see fascism driven by a barbarian or pathological will to power which denies it any substantive ideology or coherent world-view, others see it as primarily a revolt against socialism, the Enlightenment, or modernity itself. Others still have treated fascism, alongside communism, as a modern, secularized form of MILLENNIALISM and hence a >political religion= in the full sense of the word, an approach which makes it impossible to draw neat distinctions between religion and any sort of overtly utopian form of revolutionary extremism.

Any article such as this thus has recourse to artificially discrete and tidy definitions of the key words (known as >ideal types=) to delimit their meaning. The premise of the following analysis is that, in line with the findings of much recent scholarship, fascism is best seen (for analytical or >heuristic= purposes) as a revolutionary variant of modern nationalism at the heart of whose ideology, policies, tactics, and actions lies a vision of national rebirth in a post-liberal new order. This is a process in which, guided by a visionary elite, the historical nation-state or the core ethnic group (ethnie) which forms it finally overcomes the forces of decadence and disintegration which have threatened to extinguish it and becomes a rejuvenated, harmonious >community of destiny=. True to the spirit of >modern= nationalism which demonstrated its mobilizing power so spectacularly in the French Revolution and the First World War, fascists imagine their >nation= to be forged by unique historical, cultural factors, and to exist in its own right within its own historical and physical space, its homeland.

In contrast to liberal nationalism, however, the people is for fascists an organic entity which has fallen into a state of spiritual decadence and collective amnesia. Their task is to >awaken= it so that it becomes aware once more of the greatness of its pioneering mission within human history. This means purging it spiritually (and in the case of Nazism even eugenically) of degeneracy so as to forge it into a new type of society and create a 'new man= (homo fascistus), using the inspiration of a glorious past to create an alternative form of modern state based on the regenerated national community. Its ideological basis for the 'new order' is not sacred texts or even a single theoretical source, but a highly eclectic and overtly man-made synthesis of ideas which may be both modern and traditional, secular and religious, adapted to the unique historical situation in which each nation finds itself.

Fundamentalism also takes the form of a crusade against decadence. It too wants to awaken the people, to remind them of the true destiny from which they have strayed, to show them where they belong. However, at least in orthodox religious contexts, fundamentalists conceive the >people= as a community of believers created by a divine force for a metaphysical mission that is not necessarily bound up with exclusive claims to a particular territory. Its historicity is thus inseparable from a supra-historical reality, and its role within the divine cosmos is invisible to non-believers. This means that fascists and fundamentalists approach issues concerning their >chosen= people with a radically different perspective on time. Though the fascist invests the life of the nation with a mythic significance that transcends personal, profane time and hence bestows onto national heroes a form of eternity, the suprapersonal realm which it occupies is bounded by the life-span of the nation within historical time. It is what one expert on fascism has called 'an indeterminate secular otherworld, "immortal" yet of this world' (Schnapp, 1992, 30). For the fundamentalist the nation cannot be the supreme or ultimate reality, since historical time itself is transcended by an infinite reality inhabited by a supreme being or 'timeless' absolute whose will is being actualized or whose >eternal= cosmic laws are being lived out in and through the nation, no matter how oblivious it has become of its true, sacred identity and mission within secular time

The extreme resentment (and sometimes violence) with which fundamentalism resists and combats the modern world is thus not revolutionary, but reactionary and conservative. It attempts to reestablish what it conceives to be the religions true traditional or orthodox religious values based on divine revelation, whether in the form of sacred texts or the pronouncements of a visionary religious leader on whom God has bestowed charisma in the original Greek sense of 'divine grace'. This contrasts glaringly with fascism, which, no matter how much its ideologues use and abuse religious discourse, rejects Scripture and holy-men as a primary source of understanding and legitimation. It thus chooses its leaders not from the clergy but from secular individuals endowed with charismatic authority of a strictly secular kind who seek to foment passions which well up not from pious fervour, but from a heightened sense of cultural and national identity. Unlike Islamic militants such as the Lebanese and Iranian Hizbollah or the Taleban in Afghanistan, fascism thus seeks to inaugurate, not a theocracy in which power over the secular plane of reality is wrested from 'man' and returned to God, but an ethnocracy in which the 'people' is returned to itself. The salvation it achieves is thus of a terrestrial, human kind. Its martyrs are great military leaders and anonymous war heroes, not prophets and saints.

Inter-war conflations of fascism and established Christianity

The distinctions being drawn here between fascism and fundamentalism hopefully become clearer when applied to a synoptic view of inter-war fascism. In the wake of the First World War, which demonstrated the awesome destructive power of nationalism as a mobilizing myth, fascism naturally tended to take the form of ritual, charismatic politics wherever it gained critical mass as a populist force. Hence the two fascist movements which conquered power, Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, made a systematic attempt to use this type of politics to sacralize the state and turn nationalism into a 'civic religion' based on a revival of Roman and Aryan virtues respectively.

Those who assume that Christians should be immunized by their faith against being duped by the secular travesties of religion manifested in leader cults and the worship of the race might see in the refusal of Jehovah Witnesses to bow to the authority of Nazism and their terrible persecution under the Third Reich a manifestation of the ideal relationship which should exist between Christianity and fascism. In practice, however, the courageous stands taken by the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer or the Catholic Archbishop von Galen against the Third Reich were very much the exception and there was no mass resistance to fascism on theological grounds in inter-war Europe, a fact that raises extremely complex issues both in the history of Christianity and the secularization of the West, and in the nature of religion and human psychology. Perhaps one factor in explaining the failure of a purportedly Christian Europe to >stop fascism= was the human propensity for what George Orwell=s 1984 termed >double-think=, namely >the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one=s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them=. Another was the Christian Churches= long tradition of legitimizing the ambitions of the secular state and the nationalist or imperialist ambitions of its leaders, thereby giving its blessing to innumerable human atrocities committed in the name of Christ down the centuries.

However, any neat (ideal-typical) distinctions between fascism and orthodox Christianity, and hence by extension with fundamentalism as a form of ultra-orthodox or heterodox religion, which exist on paper are blurred even further by the fact that fascism is a scavenging and chameleonic ideology which survives by tailoring its ideology of national rebirth to the culture and history of the 'nation' it seeks to regenerate. It thus has no scruples about combining incongruous elements, the modern with the anti-modern, the secular with the religious (a process known as >syncretism=). Such syncretism is anathema to orthodox forms of established religion, and especially to fundamentalism, which is driven by the urge to keep faith pristine and uncontaminated by extraneous elements. As a result the relationship of fascism with established Christianity between the two World Wars varied enormously from country to country. As a rule of thumb, wherever society was extensively secularized fascism reflected this, just as its degree of anti-Semitism or the extent of its imperialistic ambitions were conditioned by how deeply these sentiments were already entrenched in popular culture. Thus the British Union of Fascists, apart from some maverick English clergymen, generally ignored Christianity altogether, while Nazism 'at the top' was religious only in a deeply pagan and anti-Christian sense, even if for pragmatic reasons it postponed suppressing the Churches. This was so as not to alienate the many millions of 'ordinary' Germans who managed with varying degrees of torment or complacency to reconcile their Christian beliefs with a fervent commitment to the racial revolution instituted by the Nazis. There was even an energetic faction of deeply anti-Semitic nationalists within the Evangelical Church called 'German Christians'. After Hitler=s election as Chancellor these sought to Nazify the Lutheran Church from within, but by the end of 1934 had been neutralized by a counter-attack from more resolutely orthodox Lutherans who formed a Confessional Church (which nevertheless colluded extensively with the Third Reich).

In Italy Fascism started out anti-clerical and republican, but the Lateran Pacts of 1929 reconciling the Vatican with the Italian Kingdom and the Fascist State was a landmark in the insidious process by which Mussolini=s regime legitimated and normalized itself. In practice this meant that millions of conventionally devout Italians mastered this ability so well that the glaring theological contradictions between Christian and Fascist faith were fudged. When members of the Catholic clergy became enthusiastic devotees of Mussolini it produced what historians have called 'clerical Fascism', which anticipated the modern hybridization of fundamentalism and racist politics to which we will return shortly.

If ideal-typical boundaries between fascism and established religion become fuzzy in the case of German Christians and 'clerical Fascists', there are several cases where the conflation of fascism with politics is even greater. In contrast to Britain, Germany, and even Italy, much of Spain had only travelled a short distance down the road of modernization, and a myth of pagan ancestry equivalent to that provided by an Aryan or Roman past was thus precluded to the Falange. It thus had recourse to the vision of a 'new Catholicity' which, though a phrase evocative of religious fundamentalism, proves on closer inspection to be quite the opposite. Catholicism was for Falangists to be gutted of its devotional, transcendental, Christ-centred core and used purely instrumentally for its mythic power as a signifier of Spain=s glorious imperial past in the 'golden' sixteenth century. Moreover, it betokened a spiritual 'faith' which, being anti-rational, anti-individualist, and anti-materialist, made it the arch-enemy of liberalism, Marxism, and democracy. The same is true of other inter-war forms of fascism where ingredients of the nation=s established religion were blended into a syncretic myth of national palingenesis, such as the Belgian Rex (Catholicism), the South African Ossewabrandwag (Dutch Reformed Christianity), and the Finnish Lapua Movement (Lutheranism).

The incorporation of established religion into fascism in the inter-war period perhaps reached it ultimate conclusion in the ideology of the Iron Guard. The importance of the Orthodox Church to Romanian history and identity led its leader Codreanu (who cut his ideological teeth in ultra-nationalist rather than Christian milieux) to assert that the whole Romanian people, past, present, and future was destined to be resurrected collectively on Judgement Day. This prophesy forms no part of Orthodox Christian thinking and is not sanctioned by any heterodox Biblical tradition indigenous to Romania. Rather Codreanu was perverting a long-standing Christian apocalyptic tradition concerned with the fate of the elect in the >Last Days= to give mythic power and legitimation to his secular nationalist vision of rebirth and the destruction of its alleged enemies, principally Jews and Communists. Hence, even though the elite of his movement called themselves the 'Legionaries of the Archangel Michael', they fought not to restore the purity of the Christian faith, but of the Romanian people.

The Iron Guard can be seen as the precursors of a number of post-war ultra-nationalists for whom religion is reduced to a signifier of nationhood and a myth disseminated in order to mobilize racial hatreds. Some of them perpetuate the fascist call for national palingenesis, such as Pamyat in Russia (which uses the Russian Orthodox Church as a discriminator of >Russianness=), or the Afrikaner Werstandsbeweging (AWB) in South Africa which, having given up attempts to sabotage the dismantling of the apartheid system in the 1990s, is now seeking to create a separatist white homeland in the new South Africa. The AWB=s symbol consists of three sevens representing the Biblical cypher for the divine Truth which is destined to overcome the forces of the Antichrist, whose apocalyptic number is 666. Yet they are set out in such a way as to deliberately evoke the Nazi Swastika, thus epitomizing fascism=s capacity to appropriate religion when it suits its cause. Meanwhile ultra-nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Balkans routinely assert their religious identity in order to pursue their separatist or irredentist claims, just as the Croatian and >Catholic= Ustasha did in inter-war Yugoslavia. They thereby perpetuate a millennial Christian tradition of riding slip-shod over Christ=s supranational message of love and forgiveness in order to legitimate territorial conquest and the destruction of enemies.

The post-war hybridization of fascism and fundamentalism

Though most candidates for genuinely fundamentalist forms of fascism fail the test when purist (ideal typical) definitional criteria are applied, the modern era has produced several forms of politics in which a fundamentalist form of religion has apparently undergone such an intense process of secularization in upholding nationalist or racist claims within historical time, the supra-historical realm of eternity has receded so far from the concerns of the believers, that a genuine hybrid seems to have resulted. According to some experts, fundamentalism cannot by definition accommodate alien >secular= elements to form hybrids. However, it is characteristic of the modern age, which can be seen as a vast experimental laboratory for the modification, transformation, and creation of ideologies, that the hybridization of ideologies which are theoretically irreconcilably opposed to each other has become a relatively common phenomenon. Like living entities ideologies are constantly mutating and adapting to the prevailing cultural habitat and socio-political space in which they operate. In the late ninteenth century revolutionary Marxism developed reformist varieties, and more recently even fascism has produced a successful democratic version of itself in Italy=s National Alliance. In the same way, monarchy, once a divine institution, has become secular and constitutional, while commercialized, >commodified= variants of Eastern mysticism and religious sects have become commonplace.

One ideal habitat for the hybridization of fascism and fundamentalism is Israel, a secular state with both Biblical and historical claims to be the legitimate homeland of the Jews, and in which communities of highly orthodox Hasidic Jews coexist with secularized 'liberal' ones in an intrinsically fragile political situation saturated with ultra-nationalist energies. Such energies are a natural consequence of the Nazi attempt to commit genocide against all Jews under the cover of the Second World War, the violent birth pangs of the State=s creation in 1948, and the continued hostility of surrounding Arab nations, especially the millions of displaced Palestinians, to Israel=s very existence. In such a cauldron of supercharged mythic forces it is inevitable that some (highly marginalized) variants of ideology have arisen at the heart of the ultra-orthodox 'religious right' (notably Kahanism) in which religious and political energies are synthesized in the demand for a rebirth which is simultaneously of Judaism as the religion of the Jewish people and of Israel as its homeland, rescued from the decadence of liberalism, socialism, and materialism.

In contemporary India a fascistized form of fundamentalism for a time has exerted considerable impact on mainstream politics.. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was formed in 1980 as the political expression of Hindutva, a form of Hindu Fundamentalism. Rejecting the principle of religious pluralism within a secular state which was the corner-stone of post-colonial India under Nehru, the BJP sees Hinduism as the spiritual essence of an organic national community and the inspiration of its rebirth in a new just order based on the precepts of the God Rama. As one of the party ideologues puts it 'Hindutva awakened the Hindus to the new world order where nations represented the aspirations of people united in history, culture, philosophy, and heroes' (Meghani, 2000, 1). At the time of sectarian violence over the rebuilding of the Ayodhya temple in the early 1990s BJP activists called for a national 'awakening' (Jagriti) and some of its militants denounced Muslims as enemies of 'true' Indians in terms deeply reminiscent of Nazi propaganda campaigns against Jews. Meanwhile its more radical leaders promised its followers rebirth from India=s political, economic, social, and moral decadence after a purging storm of violence against the Muslims who were undermining the cohesion of Indian society. Since the BJP formed a government in 1997 its policies for India=s Hinduization have been extensively moderated. India=s democratic parliamentary system has been retained and the ruthless cultural and ethnic cleansing called for by its radicals when out of power has not taken place. However, the programme to turn India into a nuclear power capable of annihilating (Islamic) Pakistan is consistent with a form of religious politics in which fundamentalism at one point acquired a fascist complexion.

Yet it is the USA, whose birth as a nation was deeply bound up for many Americans with millennial Christian hopes of a New Jerusalem, and where fundamentalist and revivalist variants of Christianity C some highly heterodox C continue to play such a crucial role both sociologically and mythically in some of its political subcultures, which provides the most propitious conditions for a symbiosis of fundamentalist values with fascist forms of nationalism. Not only do the States host countless varieties of non-conformist creeds, cults, sects, and new religions which it has already brought forth, but the formation of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the aftermath of the Amerocan Civil War opened up a permanent political space for modern fusions of religion and politics. Yet as long as the bulk of the USA=s population continued to believe that they were living in the dominant nation of the 'New World' and that its rise to ever greater power and hegemony over the rapidly declining 'Old World' would continue indefinitely, the structural basis for a mass movement of palingenetic ultra-nationalism promising to rescue America from decline did not exist. Even the Depression of the 1930s did not destroy this myth, marginalizing all attempts to emulate Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany.

However in the post-war era the American Dream started to give way to the (equally mythic) nightmare scenario that the nation=s strength as an economic, political, and military superpower was ebbing away, that the 'melting pot' principle of ethnic assimilation and equality of civil rights was generating conditions of racial civil war, and that the 'Caucasian' Whites were rapidly becoming politically impotent outcasts in 'their own' country. At this point a political and social climate formed which encouraged the appearance of movements based not, on restoring Christianity or America to its former purity, but on the need for a cleansing hurricane of violence from which a new America would emerge, a vision which admitted both fundamentalist and a fascist interpretations.

This peculiar conjuncture of historical factors has led to the proliferation in the contemporary USA of scattered religious sects, many of them with minuscule memberships, in whose creed white supremacy rather than Christian worship plays a central role. As a result, however far removed from secular brands of nationalism in principle, they now operate de facto as indigenous sources of organized racial hatred and violence on a par with fascist groups and >groupuscules= (numerically minute groupings whose strength derives from the extensive network of kindred spirits which they help form). Indeed, the boundaries between the religious right and neo-fascism have become increasingly fuzzy over the last two decades thanks to their shared belief in the need for a national and international insurrection against the evils of racial and cultural mixing, ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), and the New World Order embodied in the United Nations, combined with the extensive linkages between many racist groups fostered by the Internet. A notable example of this symbiosis is provided by the KKK. Though originally a reactionary mass movement of white Protestant resistance to the emancipation of the Blacks and (in the 1920s) to mass immigration from Europe, by the 1970s it had undergone a steep decline in membership and fragmented into scores of small and often competing regional cells. Since then it has forged links with racist skinheads and pagan neo-Nazi groups, a development which led to the joint staging of elaborate Aryan 'Fests' in which cross-burnings take place amidst swastikas, and to Klan Websites merchandizing Nazi insignia..

It is against this background that a remarkable process of hybridization has taken place between fascism and a cluster of highly heterodox and deeply divided permutations of Christianity known collectively as Christian Identity (CI), all ultimately derived from a wayward nineteenth-century form of Biblical exegesis known as British Israelism. This identified the ten tribes of Israel who did not to return to the Holy Land in the 8th century BC with European peoples, and hence was originally far from anti-Semitic. However, during the period of mass immigration to North America after the First World War it was transformed into an outlandish rationalization of belief in the innate superiority of the >Aryans=, its distinctive feature being the 'two seeds' doctrine which maintains that, while Whites are descended from Abel, Jews are the offspring of Satan=s intercourse with Eve. Whether CI can legitimately be called >fundamentalist= depends entirely on the definition applied. The term can be restricted to movements which base themselves on a return to the >fundamental doctrine= from which a religion has grown, and which are therefore >ultra-orthodox= in a way sanctioned by the interpretations of scripture of a religious caste, clergy or priesthood. This could be taken to exclude CI, which is in Protestant terms anything but orthodox in its highly selective readings and racist exegesis of Biblical texts (see Barkun, , 2000, 80-3. However, it is extremely difficult in practice to define >orthodoxy= in any of the world=s major religious traditions, especially in the case of post-Reformation Christianity, and particularly in non-conformist USA. If definitions instead emphasize fundamentalism=s emphasis on the translation of a religion into a militant, fanatical form of political and social programme based on a literal interpretation of key texts which are sacred to it, CI sects fit the description more closely.

It was in the last decades of the twentieth century that the ideology of CI groups such as The Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, The Church of Israel, Aryan Nations, Children of Yahweh, The Christian Defense League, and Kingdom Identity Ministries, blended into their distinctive Amalgams of Biblical, apocalyptic, historical, anti-Semitic, racist, and conspiratorial theories ingredients taken from New Age cults, survivalism, and the Patriots= movement, as well from neo-Nazi variants of white supremacism. As a result CI=s calls for a crusade against America=s contemporary ethnic mixing and moral decadence, whatever their roots in millennialism, now represent de facto highly syncretic permutations of palingenetic ultra-nationalism, i.e. fascism, (which could be dubbed >millenaryanism=!) perfectly adapted to the peculiarities of the USA=s thriving racist and non-conformist subcultures. This explains why CI ideas have percolated into the ideologies of American neo-Nazis and skinheads who in Europe would identify with exclusively secular or pagan forms of racism. It is no coincidence, therefore, if one of the United States= most notorious right-wing terrorist groups of the post-war era, the Order (otherwise known as the Silent Brotherhood, or Holy Order of Aryan Warriors), brought together militant racists from CI, Odinist (neo-pagan), and conventional neo-Nazi backgrounds. Though traditional fascist studies have tended to ignore the fact, the ease with which non-conformist religion can combine with fascism in the racist subcultures in which CI groups have taken root has enabled the USA, which played a negligible role in inter-war fascism, to make a major contribution to the revision of contemporary fascism away from slavish imitation of its inter-war role models, Fascism and Nazism.

Nor should the hybridization of heterodox religious fundamentalism with elements of fascist racism in the USA be thought of as exclusive to white supremacism. The USA of the 1930s saw the emergence of an (in orthodox terms) equally aberrant form of Islam based on belief in a Lost Nation of Asia of African descent, practically a mirror image of the British Israel >Christian= foundation myth. The resulting movement, The Nation of Islam, went on to gain high public profile in the 1950s and 60s when Malcom X (assassinated in 1965) was its National Spokesman, and under the subsequent leadership of Louis Farrakhan proved its ability to stage a mass demonstration of ethnic solidarity on a scale of which white supremacists can only dream when hundreds of thousands participated in the Million Man March of 1995.

The BJP illustrates the latent capacity of most organized religions to fundamentalize, politicize and fascistize themselves when the forces of secularization create the right historical conditions in a traditional non-Western culture. But for the time being it is the peculiar sociological, cultural, and mythic habitat created within both black and white enclaves of socially marginalized North Americans which looks likely to produce the most vigorous and viable hybrids of the religious and political energies with which this article is concerned. Nor are the new hybrids once engendered, white or black, confined to America. Thanks to the Web, Nazified Christian fundamentalism is now effectively a dialect of >cyberfascism= readily downloadable to inspire the formation and activities of groupuscules wherever religiously inclined Whites succumb to the temptation of diagnosing the state of the world in terms of decadence and palingenesis. This has created the basis for the emergence of a Euro-American radical right which was unthinkable in the days when Fascism and Nazism were at the peak of their power. Meanwhile, the Nation of Islam=s peculiar blend of religion and politics, especially its use of Islam as a signifier of a non-White identity, has found receptive ears in black communities in the Caribbean, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

In an age dominated by increasing globalization, materialism, multiculturalism, economic dysfunctions and ecological crises, the attraction exerted on small, highly marginalized groups within the spiritually homeless and materially dispossessed in Westernized countries by combinations of fascism and racism with occultism, paganism, apocalyptic Christianity, or radical Islam is liable to grow rather than wane. Nor should the dangers of collaboration between groups which on paper remain deeply divided ideologically be underestimated. White and black supremacists certainly have more respect for each other than for >race traitors=, as a letter from the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to Minister, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, graphically illustrates (Kaplan, 2000, 555-556). Indeed, racists are increasingly prone to bury many differences which their convictions should logically create for the sake of their common crusade against multi-culturalism, miscegenation, and mindless materialism. In this context the plea for a racial ecumenicalism made in an open letter written by imprisoned Order member Gary Lee Yarborough in 1983 acquires a special resonance: 'Whether you are National Socialist, Klan, Odinist, Christian Identity, Skinhead, Creator, or any other cult, creed, faith, or persuasion of our cause does not matter...Our faith is our Race, and our Race is our faith!!!' (Kaplan, 2000, 531)

Roger Griffin (Professor in History, Oxford Brookes University)

See also: Fundamentalism; millennialism, Hizbollah; Taleban; Jehova Witness; Hasidic Jews; Kahanism; Bharatiya Janata Party; Hindu fundamentalism; Ku Klux Klan; Christian Identity.

Books

Akenson, Donald Harman (1992). God=s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Barkun, Michael (1997). Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of Christian Identity Movement Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.

Barkun Michael (2000), >Christian Identity= in Landes, Richard (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements. New York: Routledge.

Conkin, Paul (1997). American Originals: Homemade varieties of Christianity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Gentile, Emilio (1996). The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Griffin, Roger (1995). Fascism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Griffin, Roger (March 1998) `"I am no longer human. I am a Titan. A god!" The fascist quest to regenerate time'. Electronic Seminars in History at
Kaplan, Jeffrey (1997). Radical Religion in America. Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah . Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.

Kaplan, Kaplan (ed.) (2000). Encyclopedia of White Power. New York, Oxford: AltaMira.

Kaplan, Jeffrey and Weinberg, Leonard (1998). The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Laqueur, Walter (1996). Fascism. Past, Present, Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Meghani, Megir, (2000) Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology, http://www.njp.org/history/htvintro-mm.html

Orwell, George (1987) 1984 . London: Penguin

Schnapp, Jeffrey (1992) 'Epic Demonstrations', in R. J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. New Hampshire: Hanover.

Turner, Richard Brent (1997). Islam in the African-American Experience. Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Websites

BJP Website on 20/10/2000

Christian Identity Websites are numerous and are best accessed via Hatewatch on 20/10/2000

Nation of Islam Website on 20/10/2000

 

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