Venting Anguish: The Emotional Framework of the White Nationalist Novel

In examining the various cycles of white nationalist fiction, this work makes the assertion that the ‘shame’ felt by white Southerners at having lost the American Civil War was transferred and vicariously absorbed by the white nationalist right and the more extreme elements of the

right-wing in the United States as it fought and continues to fight the various battles of the

‘culture wars.’ Overall, it takes the racist right around twenty years to come to grips with the victories of the Political left and analyze through fiction what the various victories mean for them and ‘their race.’ Hence, the cycles of white nationalist prose crystallize in fictional form the anguish and humiliation, not to mention the cathartic wish fulfillment and warning imparted in the novels under discussion.

In many ways, these battles are as old as the republic itself or at least as old as substantial immigration, as many of the fears expressed by the present-day ‘racist’ right were also expressed in similar ways by the nativist Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, and its forebears in the various anti-Catholic groups of the North during the Jacksonian era of the Early Republic. Indeed, it was the Know Nothings and like-minded groups’ ‘brass knuckle crusade’ for the three decades preceding the American Civil War that produced the first cycle of proto-white nationalist novels

—the Convent Exposés, among them the bestselling book before the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, namely Maria Monk’s The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.¹²⁶ The success of Maria Monk’s highly fictional and scurrilous novel spawned various imitators, which in turn, spawned rumors of Catholic conspiracies of trying to undermine the government of the United States;

hence, fears of conspiracy have been prevalent in white nationalist novels since the 1830s.

However, one of the more interesting elements to have occurred in recent years has been the evolution of the white nationalist novel into the white separatist novel, with various authors imagining a part of the United States being broken off and ruled by various forms of white nationalists. The reason for the development of the white separatist novel, as opposed to the white supremacist novel, is the change in attitude of the ‘intelligentsia’ of the white nationalist right. Basically, the most prolific of them believe that the United States, in its current form, is broken and the only way for the white ‘race’ to survive on the North American continent is to have a separate homeland.

126 ‘Brass Knuckle Crusade’ is the title of one of the first modern studies of the Know Nothing Party, namely Carleton Beals’ Brass Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know Nothing Conspiracy, 1830-1856 (New York: Hastings House, 1960). However, the first academic study of any note on the Know Nothing Party was published in 1938 and authored by Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938). In recent years, American historiography seems to have chosen to ignore or forget the ‘turbulent era’ of Jacksonian America. Indeed, some of the best historiography such as Beals’ book and Leonard L. Richards “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1970) present a more realistic picture of a nation fractured by racial strife and of a North that was far from completely in agreement on the questions of immigration, slavery, or indeed, any issue, at least before the publication of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin than is currently presented in contemporary historiography.

In looking at the literature about loss of self-respect and/or loss of self, there have been several studies on shame; however, one of the most overlooked and, for this project, the most important is Thomas J. Scheff’s Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism and War, which was published at the height of the Bosnian Civil War in 1994.¹²⁷ As such, this subchapter now turns to examine his theories in light of the various cycles of white nationalist literature, bearing in mind that terms such as ‘pride,’ ‘shame,’ ‘humiliation,’ and ‘respect’ imbue white nationalist rhetoric with a feeling of persecution that plays an important part in self-perception and indeed, in the ways in which the major characters express their reasons for rebelling against the dream of racial harmony that has been reinforced by various groups since the victory of the Civil Rights movement.

Shame seems to be of overriding significance in the study of any of a number of

‘underground’ or ‘fringe’ political ideologies. Indeed, Adolf Hitler capitalized on post-World War One German shame to build a formidable political machine, the NSDAP, from disaffected soldiers shamed by the Versailles treaty, pan-German nationalists dreaming of a ‘greater’ German Reich, mystics and others. The Jim Crow laws in the post-Reconstruction South could be seen as another way of counteracting the shame felt by many former Confederates at losing the war.

‘Fine,’ they seemed to say, ‘we will free the slaves but we will not allow you to tell us how to organize our society’ or in the words of one Mississippi clergyman immediately after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, that “if we cannot gain our political [independence], let us establish at least our mental independence” (Connelly and Bellows 1982, 19). While this quote was given in the context of Southern religion and the rise of evangelical belief after the Confederate defeat, it establishes that for former Confederates, the shame at being defeated did not include the overturning of Southern society, as they saw it. Shame, pride, and revenge imbue white nationalist thought and there definitely needs to be more research on this matter, the anti-immigrant feelings in Europe and the rise of the far right in Europe which could be viewed as a part of a backlash against attempts by the Political left to shame the average white, indigenous European into being more accommodating of immigrant culture, though it is one of many reasons of the rise of the right in Europe. Moreover, the rise and presidential victory of Donald Trump in the United States took many pundits and analysts by surprise. However, if these researchers had read any of the white nationalist novels examined in Chapter Four, the revolt of

127 Thomas J. Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994).

the ‘peasantry’ against the ‘elites’ appeared to be just a matter of time. Indeed, the study of the novels of the racist right opens up new vistas for exploring the angst felt among a particular group of people who seem to have been political left behind by the fast-changing world of massive immigration, displacement of traditional values and a popular culture that denigrates them at every turn, according to them.

The reflections of Sylvan Tomkins on shame would seem to cast a different prism on the emotions unleashed by each perceived defeat among white nationalists when viewed as a process of reoccurring shame that is felt by the far right in the wake of, not only the Confederate defeat, but the defeat of white nationalist ideology, of which the Confederacy is a direct forbearer:

If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest in to the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the go; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul.

[…] he [a person] feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. (Sedgewick and Frank 1995, 133)

“Defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth,” aptly describes the tone of how the major characters of white nationalist novels express their feelings at having to live in contemporary American society. Furthermore, Scheff’s book, in examining marital counselor Helen Lewis’s theory on marital conflict, offers an interesting insight into how the ‘retriggering’ mechanism of white nationalist trauma occurs. Lewis’s theory revolves around the idea of ‘unacknowledged’

shame, which in Scheff’s concept is taken to include social interactions, in that way, the idea of unacknowledged shame is analogous to Schivelbusch’s idea of the victorious side’s refusal to acknowledge a sacrificial act by the defeated. In Scheff’s recounting of Lewis’s theory, the cycle of violence in a marriage is extrapolated to include a conflict between two parties and normally spirals out of control. “The cycle involved disrespect, humiliation, revenge, counter-revenge, and so on, ending in violence.” However, the starting point for one party is unacknowledged shame,

“To lead to blind rage, the shame component in the emotions that are aroused must be unacknowledged” (Scheff 1994, 68). More importantly, it seems that the emotion or feeling of shame can escalate “continually to the point that a person or a group can be in a permanent fit of shame-rage, a kind of madness” (Scheff 1994, 67). If Scheff is correct, then it would appear that white nationalist writers have been in a ‘(semi-)permanent fit of shame-rage’ since 1865. It could be argued that former Confederates and their ideological inheritors cling to such ‘archaic’ notions of racism, and, if researchers Jessie Daniels, Abby Ferber and others, along with the majority of

pundits, are to be believed, sexism because they not only believe it is right but because the humiliation of defeat and the shame involved in that defeat are too psychologically damaging to acknowledge.¹²⁸ Echoing this thought, the words of noted historian William C. Davis regarding the loss of the Confederacy play out for the whole of the white nationalist right: “One could be beaten without having to admit defeat, and nothing was truly lost until its believers gave up”

(Davis 2003, 428). As expressions of ideas that might be denigrated by contemporary society, white nationalist novels and the study of them illustrate most coherently Michael Foucault’s dictum of studying the ‘underside’ of society.

While they are shamed by contemporary society for their political and social/cultural beliefs, they refuse to acknowledge or ‘bend the knee’ and ask for forgiveness, such being a prerequisite to being reintegrated into the contemporary culture and society. Instead of shame and humiliation, white nationalist novels and white nationalist publications concentrate on a different emotion, the longing for vengeance.

The desire for vengeance is a natural human emotion though in contemporary Western society has been subsumed and repressed for the sake of society. However, in so-called primitive societies revenge is given utmost importance:

Revenge is so consistently reported as one of the principle cause s of war that it requires detailed analysis.

Why should the human personality yearn to compensate for its humiliation in the blood of enemies? The tension-release motive plays a part here. Revenge loosens the taut feeling caused by the slaying or despoiling of one’s self, clan, tribe, nation. Even the hope for revenge helps the humiliated human to bear up, enables him to continue to function in a socially unfavorable environment. […] Revenge, or the hope of revenge, restores the deflated ego, and is a conflict motive with which mankind must reckon with universally. (Scheff 1994, 64)

In the white nationalist context, the vicarious manifestation of hope at revenge is expressedin the quotes used in Chapter Four, in the subchapter on revenge. For this subchapter however, the emotions of vengeance and humiliation are the most important aspects under examination. Since humiliation and vengeance seem to be intertwined within white nationalist fiction, it is these emotions that serve as the triggers of the retriggering of shame and humiliation at defeat.

The desire for revenge because of a real or imagined national shame, humiliation and a need to protect the nation permeate the ideology of all nationalist groups, whether national, racial

128 Jessie Daniels is the author of White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1997). This title of this book , as stated in Chapter One of this work is a bit of a misnomer, as she only examines a few of the ‘party’ publications that were only available through subscription. Again, she does not examine any white nationalist novels. Abby L. Ferber is the author of White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Daniels also authored Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

or religious. Since shame is an integral aspect of revenge, for an individual or a nation must be shamed before seeking revenge, then a group or person may be in a ‘shame’ state towards another. If such a state exists, “one route of denial is to become angered at the other, whether the other is responsible or not. That is, one feels rejected by, insulted by, or inferior to another, denial of shame can result in a shame-anger loop of unlimited intensity and duration” (Scheff 1994, 62).

This denial may lead to shame-rage which feeds upon itself. In examining Helen Lewis’ study on marital conflict, Scheff looks at the cycle of that conflict which involves “disrespect, humiliation, revenge, counter-revenge, and so on, ending in violence” (Scheff 1994, 68). In examining white nationalist novels and the rhetoric, whether warranted or not, against white nationalist adherents as a whole, the disrespect and vehemence directed at white nationalists’ beliefs and actual humanity does cause humiliation, shame and pushes feelings of revenge. The feelings of shame and the desire for revenge among white nationalist novelists is extremely strong, especially among the more contemporary white separatist novelists. Shame rage is not just a feeling of shame at being embarrassed in front of others but a rage that feeds upon itself and which can lead to violence as the denial of shame leads to humiliation and feelings of, to restate the point, shame, rage and feelings of being disrespected, ignored, or worthless in the eyes of others, i.e.

society.

Finally, the matter of alienation needs to be examined. In essence, there is no place for the white nationalist/white separatist to hide from the values of multiculturalism and diversity that is promoted by current American society. As Shane Ryan, the main hero in Covington’s 2004 novel A Distant Thunder points out, “I was too young to comprehend that the one wish tyranny can never grant is simply to be political left alone. The rule is that no one can stop the merry-go-round and get off. No one must be political left outside the circle of misery. All must participate.

All must sing hosannahs and all must burn the pinch of incense before the altar of the false gods of Zion” (Covington 2004, 71). In this aspect, it does not matter whether this statement is actually true, what matters is the perception that this statement is true. Since white nationalists believe that their ‘lords and masters’ will force them to mix with other races in multicultural America and there is no escape, then the idea of ‘alienation’ needs to be examined. As Scheff has pointed out, “Alienation in itself does not lead to overt conflict when the alienated parties can ignore each other. Bimodal alienation generates conflict when it is consistently denied. Denial may generate intellectual and emotional tension to the point of massive outbreaks of hatred”

(58). In the context of this subchapter, ‘alienation’ means the ability to ignore one’s erstwhile enemies or the party with which one is in conflict. Throughout the history of white nationalism in the United States, the ability of being “left alone” has been a central issue that white nationalists have promoted in their writings. However, the rise of various forms of social media, the policing of the Internet by various anti-racist watchdog groups, the ability of groups (such as various LGBTQ organizations) to bring civil suits against small businesses that, for religious reasons, do not want to cater to LGBTQ events such as weddings, and the sophisticated means of accessing extremely personal information makes the right to be left alone and to believe what one wants to believe virtually impossible. In essence, white nationalists, or it seems conservative Christian business owners, cannot just ‘ignore’ their ‘enemies,’ nor can their ‘enemies’ ignore them—this is especially true when both sides view each other as the epitome of everything that is wrong in the Western world. Finally, anger can come in very many forms within white nationalist rhetoric.

However, shame is almost nonexistent in the sense that no white nationalist writer appears to take the tack that they need to be ashamed because of their beliefs and their refusal to acknowledge the shame that their enemies want them to feel seems to be one of the most impassable issues. This issue, unacknowledged shame, can lead to anger on the part of their enemies; however, it can also cause conflict:

Unacknowledged shame appears to be recursive, it feeds upon itself. To the extent that this is the case, it could be crucial in the causation of interminable conflict. If shame goes unacknowledged, it can loop back upon itself (being ashamed that one is ashamed) or can occur with the other emotions, such as grief (unresolved grief), fear (fear panics), or anger (humiliated fury) (Scheff 1994, 61-62).

For contemporary white nationalist fiction, grief—at the loss of the Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the loss of the Nazi regime in World War Two, fear—for the future of the white race, and, anger—‘humiliated fury’ as examined above and in Chapter Four are all present. The aspect of humiliated fury is interesting as Scheff also mentions that “Anger may be interminable in the form of ‘helpless anger’ or in the more explosive form ‘humiliated fury.’ The shame-anger loop may be particularly central to destructive conflict” (Scheff 1994, 62). If Scheff is correct, then the more American society pushes multiculturalism and diversity, the more white nationalists and others will rebel against what society feels is appropriate behavior. After all, rebellion is very American and it seems that the American ‘way’ is to ignore the dictates of society and forge one’s own way. Within their novels, most contemporary white nationalist authors express many forms of humiliated fury. This humiliated fury is tied to feelings of being shamed by

contemporary society, but it also relates to what many white nationalists feel is the threat of physical annihilation and loss of everything that they have held important, mainly the right to choose whether to follow the mainstream culture or create their own ‘counter’-culture.

Finally, Scheff makes one final point that provides an important prism through which the novels can be read:

If one is in a shame state with respect to another, one route of denial is to become angered at the other, whether the other is responsible or not. That is, one feels rejected by, insulted by, or inferior to another,

If one is in a shame state with respect to another, one route of denial is to become angered at the other, whether the other is responsible or not. That is, one feels rejected by, insulted by, or inferior to another,