In Search of the Mindset of Traumatic Defeat

While this idea may seem new, there are several precedents in Western culture and history that support the idea that historical trauma can lay dormant for decades or even centuries and then, provoked by a new feeling of humiliation and/or the threat of physical extermination of the nation/collective, erupt suddenly and violently. As regards the current project, that trauma is a result of not only the shock of defeat but the feeling of shame and humiliation at the loss of self/loss of masculinity that accompanied the defeat of the South and the ‘Radical Reconstruction’ of 1867-1878 that saw the forced attempt to overturn the South’s racial and social order, with a delayed levee en masse as Wolfgang Schivelbusch described the rise and success of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan (Schivelbusch 2003, 10). While some contemporary researchers of the far-right, Michael Kimmel, Jessie Daniels and others mentioned in Chapters One and Two have associated white nationalist rhetoric with the patriarchy and the loss of place, position, the psychological mechanism by which these “rebels against the dream” operate is far more complex. However, while the idea that historical memory can survive hundreds of years may seem impossible in the current ahistorical modern Western society, it must be reinforced that

‘historical memory’ at a loss of ‘national’ self or a humiliation by military defeat and occupation has formed the national psyche of more than one nation; the best examples in the light of the theoretical focus in this chapter are Serbia and Ireland.

Among the various examples that could be used, two of the better known ones will suffice to illustrate the process. The first is the defeat of the medieval Serbian Empire on the field

106 James W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).

of Kosovo Polje—the Field of Blackbirds—in 1389. The humiliation felt by the Serbian nation’s occupation by the Ottoman Empire for over 400 years (while under Russian tutelage and given relative autonomy in 1808, Serbia did not achieve full independence until 1878) was engrained into the psyche of the nation, particularly among those labelled as nationalists. This feeling of humiliation and the accompanying feelings of revenge came to the fore not only during the Balkan Wars, World Wars One and Two but more importantly, in the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, where Serbian commanders and soldiers routinely labelled their Bosnian Muslim opponents

‘Turks.’ Furthermore, the Serbian nationalists called their Croatian enemies ‘Ustasha,’ invoking national memories of the persecution of the Serbian minority by the NDH—the Independent State of Croatia during World War Two. The Ustasha were a notorious terrorist organization headed by Ante Pavelić that was instrumental in assassinating the King of Yugoslavia in 1934 and who ruled the NDH with a terror that shocked the Nazis. For their part, Croatian nationalists also retaliated by calling the Serbian paramilitaries and the Federal Yugoslav Army ‘Chetniks,’

harkening back to World War Two where a veritable civil war raged in Bosnia between the various German backed militias—the Croatian Ustasha, the Serbian Chetniks and the Bosnian Muslim Village Defence Force, along with Tito’s Partisans, and the Italian Army (until 1943 when the Italian Army surrendered, and either retreated back to Italy or were interned by the Germans).¹⁰⁷

The second example is the IRA—the Irish Republican Army. While modern in their formal establishment and communist in their political orientation, the ‘Hats’ grew out of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the Irish Civil War of 1920-1922, and the mythology surrounding the group can be traced to those elements within the Irish Catholic community that feel that they have been involved in a colonial struggle against an oppressor since the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Failed rebellions in 1798 (which included some Irish Protestants) and 1916, the famous Easter Rebellion, along with the massive potato famine of the 1830s and Cromwell’s ‘plantation’

system of the 1650s have political left various historical scars on the Irish national psyche that

107 For a brief history of the troubled region of Kosova/Kosovo, see Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1998. For Bosnia, see the same author, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994). The academic writing on World War Two in the Former Yugoslavia is voluminous;

however, several books stand out, at least in English—Jozo Tomasevich’s study on the Chetniks War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975) , along with his massive study on the Ustasha and the NDH, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) will provide the reader with a basis to understand the complexities surrounding the cauldron of historical memory regarding Bosnia-Herzegovina and the states of the Former

Yugoslavia during World War Two.

have yet to heal.¹⁰⁸ Perhaps on the surface, these historical events are forgotten or, at best, are unimportant in contemporary Irish society, although Irish nationalists, like Serbian nationalists keep the trauma alive in their songs and stories. As history has shown, national humiliations can erupt violently when the nation goes through a period of destabilization such as economic collapse or internal political strife.

Within the context of this work, American white nationalist authors continually reinforce the idea that contemporary American society is humiliating their beliefs, and, by extension, attacking their manhood with its insistence on multiculturalism, pansexuality, and rights for everyone but them. The feelings of shame at not only having one’s beliefs belittled or demonized, along with popular American culture’s insistence that white men are the epitome of racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes has shamed and confused many white men as to their proper place in American society.¹⁰⁹ As will be seen, this confusion can lead to shame and a loss of self-respect and as noted prison psychologist James Gilligan has pointed out, violence in American society stems from a perceived loss of self-respect.¹¹⁰ To highlight this point, Gilligan points to a prisoner in the prison where he worked that became ever more violent with his encounters with correction officers. When the prisoner was interviewed by Gilligan as to the cause of his violent behavior and asked what he wanted, the prisoner responded:

"Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem." And then he went on to say, more clearly than ever before: "And I'll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it! My life ain’t worth nothin’ if I take somebody disrespectin’ me and callin’ me punk asshole faggot and goin’ ‘Ha! Ha!’ at me. Life ain’t worth livin’ if there ain’t nothin’ worth dyin’ for. If you ain’t got pride, you got nothin’." (Gilligan 1997, 106).

Taking the above quote as the starting point for the discussion of this chapter, it also sheds a new light on the cultural battles within the United States, as the current discussion over the place of the various Confederate symbols and what the white nationalists see as the demonization of straight, white males as the wellspring of all that is evil and wrong in American culture and

108 As with the previous issue, the writing on the various Irish uprisings and historical memory is wide-ranging;

however, the following works will provide the reader with a basis for further study: Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA: A History (London: Fontana, 1971), reprinted in several editions. For the Easter Rebellion, see Fearghal McGarry, Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising (London: Penguin, 2012). For Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland, see Denis Main Ross Esson, The Curse of Cromwell: The Ironside Conquest of Ireland, 1649-1653 (London: Rowman and

Littlefield, 1971) and Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honorable Enemy—The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland (London: Phoenix, 2001). For an Irish perspective, see Michael O’ Siochru, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).

109 In essence, the novels presented in Chapter Four will provide the reader with a sense of what white nationalist’s feel and think about the current wave of hysteria that seems to have engulfed American whites since the end of the Civil Rights Era.

110 James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

society. In the context of the quote that began this chapter, an essay appeared on various right-wing websites that reinforces the idea that the desire for self-respect and the hindrance of trauma are at the core of the white nationalist mindset. Within the context of the below quote and the quote that headed this chapter, it is important to bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of the privately held firearms within the United States are in the hands of the same group that feels it has been demonized in the mass media for over three decades.¹¹¹ As stated in the Internet essay

“The Angry Man,” some American white males appear to be becoming tired of being the object of jokes and the epitome of all that is wrong in American society:

The Angry Man owns firearms, and he’s willing to pick up a gun and use it in defense of his home, his country and his family. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others […]

Mostly, it’s the blatantly arrogant attitude displayed implying that we are too stupid to run our own lives and only people in government and academia are smart enough to do that. The Angry Man has reached his limit. When a social justice agitator goes on TV, leading some rally for Black Lives Matter, safe spaces or other such nonsense, he may bite his tongue, but he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement. (Anonymous, “Angry” 2016, 14–15)

Following the above quote, this chapter examines the overwhelming desire for self-respect and the rejection that white nationalists have regarding their unapologetic way of thinking. Basically, they reject current America’s society’s attempts to shame them into ‘towing the line’ and believing that people “[…] will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”¹¹² Therefore, this chapter starts with a short history of white nationalist fiction, then proceeds to outline how the various cycles of American white nationalist fiction have evoked memories of the trauma, ‘re-kindling’ as it were, white nationalist fears at a loss of manhood and re-stoking fears of annihilation at the hands of the ‘Others.’ Finally, this chapter ends with a theory of how and why national/racial trauma is not easy to forget or salve over, which leads to an analysis of the novels in Chapter Four.

111 For the history and culture of guns in the United States, see Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy by Joan Burbick (New York: The New Press, 2006), Clayton E. Cramer, Armed America: The Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (New York: Nelson Current, 2006) and Jen E. Dizard, Robert Merrill Muth and Stephen P. Andrews, editors, Guns in America: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999). For race and gun ownership, see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demographics-and-politics-of-gun-owning-households/, http://demographicpartitions.org/gun-owners/,

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/4/9849524/gun-race-statistics, and finally,

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/06/12/gun-owners-still-overwhelmingly-white-males.

112 Taken from Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on August 28, 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C. The full quote: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their

character.”

The retriggering of trauma seems to occur with every victory of the progressive Political left, therefore, it would behoove any researcher of the racist right to examine the various cycles of white nationalist novels and how they fit into the idea of the perceived loss of manhood and loss of self-esteem/loss of self-respect/loss of self as painted by the novelists. Consequently, the next subchapter will examine the various milieus of white nationalist fiction, starting with the Redeemer/Klan Apologia literature which ended with the 1939 publication of Thomas Dixon’s last novel, The Flaming Sword. Combining and overlapping with the Redeemer literature was the rise of the Yellow Peril, Red Scare, and White Slavery novels; this cycle ended with the publication of 1941’s Sown in the Darkness, A. D. 2000, authored by William R. Twiford. The next cycle starts with the publication of The Turner Diaries in 1978 to the publication of Harold Covington’s The Hill of the Ravens and Gregory Kay’s The Third Revolution, both published in 2004. At present, the current cycle has yet to end, although it remains to be seen how the 2016 presidential victory of Donald J. Trump and the ‘alt-right’ will affect this latest cycle of white nationalist novels, which are more white separatist than white supremacist.