Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Racist Apocalypse: Millennialism on the Far Right

1990; American studies; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2153-6856

Michael Barkun,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

For the last quarter-century, America has been saturated with apocalyptic themes. Indeed, not since the 1 830s and '40s have so many visions of the end been disseminated to so wide an audience.1 Current apocalyptic scenarios range from secular forecasts of nuclear war and environmental collapse, articulated by Robert Heilbroner and others, to the Biblically-based premillennialism of Hal Lindsey and Jerry Falwell.2 While the former have spread widely among secular intellectuals, and the latter among a large fundamentalist audience, they do not exhaust America's preoccupation with the end of history. There are other future visions, neither so respectable nor so widely held, at the fringes of American religious and political discourse. While these outer reaches of the American mind are filled with many complex growths, my concern here is with one form the fringe apocalypse has taken, as part of the ideology of the racist right. These are the groups customarily referred to in the media as white supremacist and neo-Nazi. While they are uniformly committed to doctrines of racial superiority and are often open admirers of the Third Reich, to categorize them merely as white supremacist or neo-Nazi is simplistic, for these organizations bear little resemblance to earlier American fringe-right manifestations.3 The groups most representative of the new tendencies include Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho; the now-defunct Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, whose fortified community was located near Pontiac, Missouri, until 1985; and most elements of the Ku Klux Klan and Posse Comitatus. Their distinctiveness lies in their novel religious character.