Portside

SPENCER SUNSHINE’S Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege (2024) offers a brilliant account of the contemporary Far Right’s evolution told through the political biography of neo-Nazi author and activist James Mason. Sunshine succeeds in illuminating important but understudied aspects of neo-Nazi history by drawing upon Mason’s archived correspondence even as he offers useful lessons for responding to fascism in our contemporary moment. Through an analysis of Mason’s infamous newsletter Siege, Sunshine examines Mason’s role in developing two strategies that have become central to the Far Right: accelerationist terrorism and countercultural subversion. While specialists will look to this book for careful work detailing neo-Nazi sectarianism, general readers will find a compelling genealogy of the Far Right that helps us understand its actions in order to counteract them.

Sunshine first traces the trajectory of the neo-Nazi movement through Mason’s peripatetic political career, which began with his membership in George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. Rockwell implemented a strategy of mass persuasion that concentrated on winning white people over to the organization via uniformed demonstrations calculated to attract media coverage through their shocking use of the swastika and other Nazi iconography. The American Nazi Party stood out from other white supremacist political outfits in the 1960s as one of the few willing to break the taboo on outright Hitler worship. The party also had the advantage of Rockwell’s charismatic leadership, but his assassination in 1967 left the neo-Nazi movement without someone capable of holding it together—the fascists quickly splintered into an array of largely ineffectual micro-sects, many with their own wannabe führers and fussy dress regulations.

In the 1970s, Mason joined the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF), which turned away from the mass strategy to focus instead on guerilla warfare. As Sunshine shows, the NSLF adopted some of its rhetoric and tactics from militant approaches used by (nominally) leftist groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. Sunshine even suggests that NSLF founder Joseph Tommasi may have borrowed the title for what would become Mason’s neo-Nazi newsletter—Siege—from Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (1968), an account of the anti-war protests at the presidential conventions that year. The NSLF, along with many other far-right extremist groups during this period, rejected conservative reformism and embraced instead a revolutionary ideology calling for the overthrow of the state through terrorist violence. These neo-Nazi groups also relaxed the faux-military discipline associated with the American Nazi Party and its would-be successors, allowing members to take drugs and grow their hair out.

With the neo-Nazis embroiled in sectarian splitting despite efforts to unite the right, Mason grew skeptical about the possibility of achieving his racist and antisemitic goals through organized guerrilla war. As Sunshine demonstrates, although the neo-Nazi movement often deployed violence for political purposes, it was also plagued by bouts of gratuitous violence unconnected to any strategic goal. Many members of neo-Nazi organizations were antisocial individuals with criminal or otherwise troubled backgrounds who were prone to fighting in general, and Mason tapped into this murderous impulse in Siege in the 1980s. He praised serial killers and mass shooters he associated with the movement’s ideology, but he also celebrated all random violence as a way of disrupting what he considered to be the Jewish-controlled system. Mason thus became a forebear of right-wing accelerationism, which seeks to hasten societal collapse by fomenting racial conflict through terrorist attacks. The white ethnostate, such accelerationists claim, can only be built among the current system’s ruins.

Sunshine makes the useful point that Mason’s ideology—and, indeed, the entire neo-Nazi movement—evolved in response to defeat. Neo-Nazism’s genocidal revolution never arrived, and the movement remained fragmented and unpopular. Many neo-Nazis dealt with this problem by developing increasingly extreme methods of contestation that didn’t require organization or persuasion of the recalcitrant white masses, a rearguard move that was often accompanied by a retreat into the theoretical elaboration of neo-Nazi doctrine. In some sense, this sounds like a lot like the alt-right’s story: disaffected with neoconservatism and neoliberalism, the alt-right attempted to build a mass movement using protest and propaganda but largely lost momentum due to internal dissension and external resistance. Following this setback, some white nationalists rejected “optics” and began to encourage or perpetrate murderous attacks such as the mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas.

Mason’s penchant for violence also led him to his most notorious obsession, Charles Manson. Mason believed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s argument that the Manson family hoped to ignite a race war, and Mason came to idolize Manson as the new Hitler who could save the white race. Sunshine shows that Manson, who once carved a swastika into his forehead, treated Mason as his new disciple and offered him political and spiritual guidance from prison. Many contemporary members of the neo-Nazi movement loathed this new turn in Mason’s politics, but his Siege writings came to inspire violent fascists including terrorist groups such as the Atomwaffen Division in the 21st century. “Read Siege” became an oft-repeated injunction on the far right.

But how did Mason’s Siege—an obscure, self-published periodical that probably never reached more than a hundred readers when it ceased publication in 1986—become a viral hate manifesto three decades later? The final section of Sunshine’s book answers this question by tracing how a group rooted in underground subcultures such as industrial music and LaVeyen Satanism kept Mason’s thought alive by republishing and referencing his writing. This social circle, which he calls the Abraxas Clique, centered on musician Boyd Rice, Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, author Michael Moynihan, and occultist Nikolas Schreck. At some moments, the Abraxas Clique presented Manson, Mason, and Hitler as ambiguous or ironic cultural signifiers designed to shock or provoke. Members of the Abraxas Clique were often willing to entertain controversial ideas—Parfrey promoted eugenics, Rice called for mass murder—but they stopped short of publicly identifying as neo-Nazis. But Sunshine reveals that key figures such as Rice, Parfrey, and Moynihan were less circumspect in private, sending fawning letters to Mason that seemed to express sympathy with his poisonous ideology. From Milo Yiannopoulos to Stephen Miller, we’ve seen this pattern of public disavowal and private affinity many times in the history of contemporary fascism.

Over the years, there have been many debates about what each member of the Abraxas Clique felt in their heart of hearts. It’s a very Protestant way of thinking about politics: you’re only a true believer if your external profession of belief is matched by authentic inner faith. Sunshine’s history might provide another way of thinking that doesn’t get caught up in such individualist psychodrama. What was important about the Abraxas Clique was that it connected people to Mason and his writings. Mason wasn’t especially concerned with the depth or sincerity of Abraxas beliefs so long as the group circulated his work and introduced him to new potential recruits. As Sunshine shows, Mason himself got his start in neo-Nazism when he read the address for the American Nazi Party on a banner in a photograph on the cover of an ostensibly well-meaning exposé. In what might be termed the citational politics of fascism, these linkages matter more than intentions. Ironic or not, the Abraxas Clique built a new network for Mason that he could not have created on his own.

Indeed, subsequent history has shown that, frequently, it’s the fence-sitters, provocateurs, and other bad faith actors who extend the fascist network to individuals or communities that wouldn’t otherwise encounter right-wing extremism. Ambivalence can even be a virtue in the role of fascist proselytizer. Many who wouldn’t bother listening to a convinced neo-Nazi will entertain someone who’s just making jokes or asking questions even if it leads them down the path toward white nationalism. Thanks to the internet, fascists no longer need to worry as much about recruits finding their contact information, but they do have to make themselves legible to algorithms and salient to popular conversations. People peripheral to the fascist network prove to be central to its expansion in these moments. Vampires always need someone at the threshold to invite them into places where they haven’t been.

The Siege case also shows us how flexible fascism can be. Neo-Nazism begins to look less like a personal creed with specific tenets and more like a reactionary structure of thought that changes based on context. Wherever someone imagines that life is a biological struggle for survival, hierarchy is rooted in nature, and the world is divided between creative elites and disposable subhumans, something like neo-Nazism is almost certainly quick to follow. One of Mason’s innovations was to rebrand neo-Nazism as the Universal Order, an abstract concept that allowed him to tolerate a great deal of ideological and even ethnic diversity in people willing to further his genocidal cause. Sunshine reveals how neo-Nazism adorned itself with the generalized misanthropy characteristic of the extreme subcultures of the 1990s, an important lesson to remember in the modern moment as fascism reclothes itself as transphobia and religious chauvinism.

Sunshine’s study points the way toward several other avenues of exploration. Although Sunshine offers us the definitive history of neo-Nazi edgelords, we have yet to fully explore the other dominant aesthetic on the far right: fascist sentimentalism. We catch a glimpse of this when Sunshine quotes a neo-Nazi who claims to fight for a world without loneliness. Seyward Darby has shed light on “tradwives,” who trade in bucolic images of white homemakers, but there is still work to be done on contemporary fascism’s obsessions with genres such as the pastoral or melodrama, its love for kitsch and cuteness, its middlebrow enthusiasm for morally edifying culture, and its weepy professions of brotherhood and friendship. Transgression is only one mask fascism wears when it goes out.

But there is also more to say about Sunshine’s subjects. Because Sunshine’s study devotes itself to bringing clarity to questions about who said what to whom, correctly avoiding the murky questions of meaning that have often clouded the Abraxas Clique’s political project. It’s true that indeterminacy can become a trap here. Fascist obfuscation calls for a strategic literalism that refuses to play interpretive games with neo-Nazis or their fellow travelers. But the thorny problem of reception still matters to me, as a critic and someone who brushed up against this subculture in the 1990s. In my adolescence, I listened to industrial music, read up on Manson, and purchased occult books including Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible (1969). I acquired a copy of Parfrey’s notorious 1987 anthology Apocalypse Culture—which includes material from Mason—but I found the collection too repulsive and disturbing to read cover to cover. Later, I would read Moynihan’s Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, co-authored with Didrik Søderlind and published by Feral House, on Scandinavian black metal and its extensive involvement with white nationalism. If someone had asked, I probably would have guessed that most people in this cultural milieu hated fascism as much as I did.

Of course, I would have arrived at that conclusion partly through naivete and ignorance—these were the passing interests of an isolated teenager before everything could be googled—but the Abraxas Clique’s cultural production also allowed itself to be read this way. The Far Right frequently exploits ideological indeterminacy. As I argue in Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, fascists turn cultural critiques of their ideology into affirmations of it. Anti-fascist texts like Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986–87) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) expose how the audience’s favorite genres have proven to be complicit with reactionary thought and feeling, but they do so to expose and eradicate those sentiments. Alt-right readers ignore the last part where fascism is banished. Instead, they argue that superheroes and space explorers are fascist by nature—and therefore should be celebrated. This is an old problem: the 1982 film Pink Floyd: The Wall warned that the rock-star celebrity could become a right-wing dictator wielding hammers against his enemies; the neo-Nazi Hammerskins embraced this image as their symbol.

But the scenes detailed in Sunshine’s book seem to hold a somewhat different cultural politics rooted in horror. The revelation of the audience’s secret yearning for authoritarianism turns out to be sublime or terrible depending on whether the interpreter is fascist or anti-fascist. I always assumed Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture was meant to be read with fear and disgust, but any horror scholar knows that the genre frequently provides a surreptitious way to fulfill desires censored by the dominant culture. Presented amid representations of serial killing and self-mutilation, the neo-Nazi content in Apocalypse Culture can be interpreted as either a symptom of or a cure for the depravity displayed in the rest of the book, depending on one’s political prejudices. It is fitting, then, that this milieu’s patron saint is Manson, the evil decoder who glossed love as hate and read racist prophecies into the Beatles’ White Album (1968). White nationalists have become masters at subversive reading.

None of this is to say that these genres are synonymous with fascism. As industrial music critic S. Alexander Reed has pointed out, the genre has produced acts that diagnose, détourn, and defuse fascist fantasies, as well as musicians, that straight-out endorse or exploit them. Black metal has yielded ethnically diverse and progressive bands such as Zeal & Ardor as well as murderous white supremacists like Burzum, Satanic occultists remain wildly divergent in their political commitments, and horror media boasts a strong and long-lived anti-fascist tendency exemplified in recent years by Jeremy Saulnier’s film Green Room (2015) and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt (2022).

At the same time, we should move beyond the banal observation that anything can signify anything. Instead, we must attend to white supremacy’s power to warp meaning. Reading like a fascist is not an individual error. Our society is so pervaded by racial violence and domination that it magnetizes meaning to the far right. If a fascist reading or misreading of a text is possible, someone will exploit it. Under these conditions, a parodic or figurative fascism quickly becomes a symbol of sincere fascism. As Sunshine proves, neo-Nazis and the edgelords who love them stand ready to take advantage of this predicament.