George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party until his violent death in 1967, gushed about having had a mystical experience when he first read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “I realized that National Socialism [was] actually a new religion,” said Rockwell, who considered April 20th the holiest day of the calendar year.
That’s when neo-Nazis around the world celebrate Hitler’s birthday at secretive gatherings with Aryan shrines, devotional rituals, white power regalia, and other racialist kitsch.
These annual conclaves are akin to religious ceremonies where true believers worship Hitler as an infallible diety whose every utterance is gospel.
The bizarre quasi-religious and mythic elements that proliferate in sectors of the contemporary neo-Nazi milieu are explored by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his important, new book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity.
Although there has always been a theocratic strain in fascist movements, several factors are contributing to a latter-day, “folkish” (or tribal) revival among white youth who are beset by an acute sense of disenfranchisement in Western societies.
In response to the challenges of globalization, multiculturalism, and large-scale Third World immigration, neo-Nazi racism in the United States, Europe and elsewhere has sometimes morphed into what the author describes as “new folkish religions of white identity.” (more...)
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