Barbarism as Civilization: White Afghanistan and the Alt-Right
I encountered the phrase “White Afghanistan” a few months ago, while doing rudimentary research about the odd, and seemingly oxymoronic, concept of “White Sharia.” I was exposed to the latter a year ago, in the news coverage of the Unite the Right Rally, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Notable for, among other things, its alternative deployment of tiki torches, the rally was the political equivalent of a volcanic eruption, a manifestation of pressures that had been building for quite some time. While the torches were only symbolic mementoes of the old lynching days, the violence that erupted in the rally and its immediate aftermath was real as well as symbolic. James Alex Fields, Jr., the man who rammed his car into the crowd of counter-protestors and killed one, was shouting, “White Sharia Now!”
If we are to believe the scant and effervescent online narratives, it all started with a meme, showing the close-up of a fair-skinned woman veiling her face except for the eyes. Showing up in private chatrooms, the meme introduced the concept that white men should pursue a social order that emulates the putative misogyny of Muslims. Two birds with one stone: advance the image of your patriarchy and also further your Islamophobia with a backhanded compliment. Like all Internet memes, it lacked proper articulation, seemed jocular, and was impossible to trace to an individual creator. It was just there, waiting to be interpreted. Had it not been for the Tiki Torch Rally, the broader public may never have realized how far the alt-right has absorbed this concept, advanced it in theory—if we use the word “theory” generously—and shaken off the evident absurdity of its inverted deference to Islam.
One of propagators of White Sharia was Andrew Anglin, publisher of arguably the biggest white supremacist website, The Daily Stormer, and a close friend of Richard Spencer—the self-proclaimed leader of alt-right. According to The Atlantic’s Luke O’Brien, Anglin pushed the meme and made claims to the effect of “encouraging men to beat and rape women, take away their voting rights, and treat them like property.” The misogyny wasn’t new, but its packaging was. Some Stormer readers were apparently confused as why their overtly pernicious beliefs should be branded as Islamic, even in jest. Yet the term caught on, and gradually found a solid place in the alt-right jargon. A headline on the website, to reference just one recent example, reads, “Increase Your Desire for WHITE SHARIA By 6000000% after Watching This One Video!” The video in question is a YouTube compilation of scenes from the 2018 Women’s March.
Despite the gravity of the topic, though, I can’t help but wonder if the meme was just aimless banter; no matter how you slice it, any homage to fundamentalist Islam by a tiki-torcher falls somewhere in the spectrum between misfired prank and masterful trolling. Someone in a chat room must have been laughing hysterically, I surmise, to see the meme catching so much serious attention. That is, of course, before the joke (if it ever was a joke) produced real victims. Likewise, if I were told before April 22, 2018 that there existed an entire online community who called themselves Incels because they held society at large culpable for their failure to get laid, I’d brush it off as lacklustre humour. Come April 23, and there’s no humour to be found.
Understanding the alt-right is like snorkelling in a ditch: too shallow, too muddy, and not at all fun.
Understanding the alt-right is like snorkelling in a ditch: too shallow, too muddy, and not at all fun.[1] Every public revelation about the alt-right goes through three steps: a gasp, a hysterical smile, and an even louder gasp. The initial epiphany gives way to realization of the obvious, a Sherlock moment: it was right in front of us all along, the brewing anti-Semitism, misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia. Then comes the second epiphany, which is twofold. You wonder, first, what other pernicious signs are out there that you’re missing, and second, how old and deep is the tectonic drift between you and them. It beggars the imagination to think that people could plan, without a peck of irony, a social order that borrows from the supposedly backward brown folks in the Middle East while maintaining, by the same token, that they should be nuked out of existence.
Combatting the logic of White Sharia is as moot as trying to convince a creationist that Adam and Eve couldn’t keep a pet velociraptor. But while polemic may not be a fruitful response, we can use this concept as a prism to refract the twisted mind of an alt-rightist into discernible patterns. I am not interested, here, in asking how serious of a threat the alt-right is to civil life (the answer: very serious), or how much of the alt-right’s rise could be a direct result of public dissatisfaction with traditional realpolitik (the answer: probably a lot). Instead, I’d like to ask what we can infer about the alt-right’s mode of thought by probing its peculiar rhetoric.
As much as they share ideological tendencies with fascists of the early 20th century, the white supremacists of today are clearly different in at least one crucial aspect: they don’t mince words. The Third Reich mastered the art of euphemism: every malicious plan was clad in a colourless language. Had you never known anything about the Holocaust, it’d be fairly difficult for you to guess what “The Final Solution” actually referred to. It sounds more like a pest-control plan, a drastic tax policy, or an emergency housing strategy, rather than a genocidal answer to the equally euphemistic “Jewish Question.” Presenting cruelty as a matter of benign bureaucracy was essential to the ideological machinery of the Nazi Party. Reading Hannah Arendt’s report of Eichmann’s trial, one might be surprised to see this supposed mastermind of Holocaust was nothing but a paper pusher, and not even a particularly good one. “Banality of Evil,” Arendt’s classic, and often misunderstood, phrase characterizes a system in which a mediocre sales clerk (Eichmann used to work for the Salzburg office of an American oil company) can climb the ladder by obedience and become the agent of doom.
The Trump-era alt-right folks, on the other hand, are too impatient for such delicate rhetorical tactics. Everything is raw, nothing is cloaked by even the thinnest veneer of sophistication. Case in point is John Cameron Denton, the young leader of a paramilitary white supremacist group, who is generally known by the online sobriquet “Rape.” (Also see this in-depth report by ProPublica on the group.) These people may have 99 perilous problems, but being too much on the nose ain’t one. One possible reason for this verbal profligacy is the power imbalance. Only a tiny subset of the wide, and rather polyphonic, corpus of the radical right cares about electoral gains; the rest see the democratic state as nuisance. Flagbearer conservatives are as detested, if not more than, the rest of the names on the ballot. Positioned as a proud minority, an alt-right activist doesn’t have much to lose by embracing an abrasively honest language. Why not call yourself Rape, evoke references to crematoria whenever possible, and pepper your sentences with the N-word? What are you going to lose? Who is going to hate you whom you already don’t care for? That’s the privilege of being a permanent outlier.
But there’s something about White Sharia that is beyond provocation. The term is not as insulting as it is puzzling. Put alongside the other phrase, White Afghanistan, and it becomes a bit clearer. In contrast to White Sharia, the latter term’s coinage is hard to pinpoint, and almost every online reference to it that I could find treats the term like a well-known idiom, assuming their intended readers to have already been oriented to it. It refers to the idealized image of rural America as an uncouth patriarchy, emulating the Afghanistan of the Taliban era. The image it conjures is a white man holding an AK-47, perceiving himself as a proverbial silverback, whose wives—or concubines—are numbered as achievements.
A clear elaboration of the concept is offered by Sacco Vandal, another leading figure of the movement (the term “movement” should be used cautiously because they rarely show a unified ideological identity, ergo the reason for “Unite the Right” for their rally’s name) who is a former Marine and an Iraq veteran. Vandal (whose birth name is Scott Wurgler—he legally changed it in 2005) is a self-proclaimed leading voice of the alt-right and the author of self-published books like Intellectual Vandalism and The Militia System of the Revolutionary Generation. In June of 2017, he published a blog entry, titled “In Defense of White Sharia,” in which he not only makes a case for the term, but also boasts about his role as a “genuine originator” of the initial meme.
Parsing a blog like Vandal’s invokes less a sense of disgust than a suspicion that one has been duped.
For a reader less exposed to the online writings of the alt-right, parsing a blog like Vandal’s invokes less a sense of disgust than a suspicion that one has been duped. It reads like a submission for The Onion that was rejected for not being funny enough. Even now, writing these lines, I still can’t fully shake off the feeling of being the butt of a joke gone awry. And not just because of the tone and diction of the text—everything about it, including the biographical information of the writer, sounds odd. Take this, for instance: Sacco Vandal has a twin brother, also a self-published writer, who changed his name to Vanzetti Vandal. The white supremacist logic of the last name aside, the twisted historical reference in their first names is just too hard to swallow.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were anarchist activists tried in 1920 for robbery and murder. Under suspicious grounds that reeked of racial bias, they were convicted, and, after a long legal challenge, executed in 1927. Needless to say, the WASP America of the time viewed Italian immigrants more or less the same way today’s America perceives Mexicans. Their trial was a watershed moment in anti-left, ethnically charged prosecution in the early 20th century. Their names and fate were ingrained in the social justice movements of the next few decades, so much so that Woody Guthrie, the folk singer who wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar, produced an album called “Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti.” One of the songs, titled, “Sacco’s Letter to His Son,” reads: “The weaker ones that cry for help, the persecuted and the victim / They are your friends, friends of yours and mine / They are the comrades that fight—yes, and sometimes fall / Just as your father, your father and Bartolo, have fallen.”
But now, their names are proudly picked up by the co-authors of The American Militant Nationalist Manifesto, with lines such as this: “Make no mistake, modern American liberals are nothing more than life-hating communists; and the two terms, liberals and communists, should be used interchangeably.” If there ever will be an Irony-o-Meter, the case of Vandal brothers should be used to calibrate the device.
In the blog post about White Sharia, Sacco Vandal starts his argument by a critique of the conservative opinion that the white man is the pinnacle of civilized life, whose great achievement is distance from the type of society shaped by Sharia. “Barbarity,” he writes, “is not foreign to us whites.” He lists Vikings, Crusaders, and Conquistadores as prime examples of white barbarity, and laments: “But, alas, we have lost that barbarity.” This is the setup for his punchline: “The Muslim world is the only civilization left on Earth today where an extreme and rigidly codified patriarchy still exists. Sharia law, though practiced today by some of the world’s most despicable races, is the only living example of anything that even remotely approximates the patriarchal society that Western man once had himself.” He concludes, “I don’t like Muslims, but if they had invented the wheel, I would have no qualms about stealing it from them. If our enemies are in possession of a superior weapon, it is our duty—in the name of the survival of our race—to steal that weapon from them and use it against them.”
Including the Conquistadores in the list of white barbarous men is interesting. Even if we go by the casual stereotypes favoured in popular culture, Vikings may pass as savages, but the founders of colonies in the New World were, to European eyes, eradicators of barbarity. In fact, you’d only consider the likes of Alfonso de Albuquerque and Hernan Cortés as barbarous if your outlook is anti-colonial. Vandal’s perspective is exemplary of the alt-right’s peculiar revisionist history: an unlikely mishmash of social Darwinism and teleology. The white man is destined to be great, not because of his unique capacity for reason, but for his history of prior savagery.
Also, striving for barbarity via imitating Muslims is marked not by a call for advancement but by nostalgia. The Muslims have a “superior weapon,” which the white man once had, but somehow lost, probably down the road of Enlightenment. Again, let’s not try to argue against this; it’s pointless. The only thing valuable here is to observe their twisted logic, not to rectify it—although actively countering the policies risen from such a logic is an altogether different, and valuable, matter.
The key here is nostalgia. The voice of the liberal West, characterized as emasculated, moribund, and effete, is despised not for its failure of Western standards’ moral upper hand, but for its loss of supremacy because of adherence to such standards. It may seem too obvious to note that “alt-right” is a much more apt term to describe this mode of thinking than, say, “far right.” The latter only implies taking the right to extremes, but the former means a right that is alternative to the current right, as in, a right reconsidering what the right is, and not just a loose-cannon version of its milquetoast sibling.
The alt-right’s eccentricity speaks volumes. Their appropriation of historical narratives is as ominous, and also as ludicrous, as their use of tiki torches for an evening rally. The prevalence of White Afghanistan and White Sharia is also a sign of the alt-right’s insatiable desire to craft its own nostalgia, rather than simply borrow from old-school fascism. The Italian Fascist Party had a relatively easy job of pilfering historical images of grandeur. The Roman Empire was just there. (Fascism comes from Fasces, meaning “bundle,” that was an axe fastened in a bundle of wooden rods, erected as a symbol of imperial authority in ancient Rome.) White Afghanistan is not quite a recourse to fetishized nostalgia of an imaginary history. It’s more real, more transparent, and more puerile. “When I say we will have White Sharia in White Afghanistan one day,” Sacco Vandal writes, “it means that we will have an extreme tribal patriarchy in the ethnostate. But it also offers visions of what that patriarchy and that ethnostate could look like. People can imagine themselves with a beard and an AK [sic] in the Appalachian Mountains.” He is not offering a mythical symbol, but a blueprint.
White Afghanistan does not call for imagining a distilled history in which traces of barbarity are erased to offer a picture of glory. It asks its adherents to place glory where it always should have belonged, right in the heart of barbarity.
White Afghanistan does not call for imagining a distilled history in which traces of barbarity are erased to offer a picture of glory. It asks its adherents to place glory where it always should have belonged, right in the heart of barbarity. The difference between the right and the alt-right cannot be more pronounced than in the case of White Afghanistan. The former sees a selective image of a deprived nation, evades the colonial backdrop, and calls for a liberation of the poor fellows by offering the gift of democracy. The latter, on the contrary, claims that the image of depravity is a success story. The two share the same distorted understanding of history, but their similarities stop there. Democracy, shmocracy.
Contemporary white supremacist movements are radical in the etymologically true sense of the word: they look at roots. Despite all their egregious readings of history, their detestable fantasies, and their primal wrath, they are surprisingly honest. They show no reluctance in claiming their goal as what it is. They believe, to slightly alter Walter Benjamin’s aphorism, that man’s push for civilization is always a push for barbarity. That’s why they can be proud of Conquistadores for their savagery and not their victorious spread of Christianity, can cherish Afghanistan’s image of desolation instead of trying to save it from itself, and can make offhand remarks about gas chambers in lieu of tampering with the Final Solution.
The challenge the alt-right poses for today’s political discourse is evident in its disregard for the usual paterfamilias. Why should a dog-whistling pundit be the one to make the rules of the game? Why should a candidate who only winks his racism lead the way in the political race? Why relish the call for sensible conversation despite our differences, when realization of those very differences is on the to-do list? The established umpires of political dialogue, liberal and conservative alike, prefer to either ignore the alt-right or balance it by introducing the bugbear “alt-left.” (Even though the term “alt-left” didn’t stick for long, the call for moral equivalence of the two radical sides of the aisle is still audible. After the debacle of Roseanne Barr’s tweets, for instance, Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker described her actions as promoting “conspiracy theories pushed by the far left and the far right.”) When instead of playing chess, someone prefers to throw the pieces at the other player, what can the self-appointed referee do? At stake is not only the quality of the game, but the underlying rules. If you interfere, you risk losing your legitimacy as the impartial arbitrator. If you don’t, the game turns into a wholly different affair. Either way, it’s a loss for the referee.
Whether the alt-right will grow into an existential threat for Western democracies is anybody’s guess, but their gadfly rhetoric certainly brings pangs of recognition. One of Andrew Anglin’s recent entries in The Daily Stormer, with the headline “Yeah Bro, We Fought the Wrong War in Afghanistan,” argues that American assault against the Taliban was pragmatically wrong because the country’s opium production skyrocketed in the aftermath. “We should have supported the Taliban,” he writes. “They literally didn’t do nothing. Except completely cut heroin production in the country to almost zero. They were literally just driving up to heroin farms in jeeps, killing everyone there, and burning the fields.”
His admiration of the Taliban’s ferocity aside, Anglin’s comment is right on the money. Production of opium in Afghanistan has in fact risen considerably, despite all global incentives to curb it. The average production in the decade after the American “liberation” is almost twice as before, and 2017 saw a shocking new record. The causal link that Anglin suggests between the Taliban’s savagery and their role in drug control is too stupid to address—let alone his myopic ignorance of America’s history of supporting the Taliban—but he does raise a valid question: what is there to celebrate about the NATO invasion of Afghanistan? Which anticipated goal was tangibly achieved? The Taliban is still alive, opium is still produced, and domestic stability is still a wish. The alt-right is, although for the wrong reasons, indeed right.
[1] I prefer using the self-designated “alt-right,” instead of the more historically evocative options like Fascist or Nazi, because the argument that the latter choices unveil the true nature of these groups rather than neutralizing it is historically short-sighted. The term Nazi, now a trans-historical shorthand for evil, wasn’t always a virulent catchall; it probably had parodic roots, playfully abbreviating the German phrase for National Socialist Party. I also believe that labelling them as Nazis hides more than it reveals, because the original Nazis didn’t have White Sharia or any equivalent for it.
