Against Fascism Part Four: Stochastic Terrorism
“Are you a fascist?” he asks himself rhetorically. “Yes,” he says in response, “for once the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist.” He then adds, “I am sure the journalists will love that.” — Manifesto of “Person X,” as quoted by Jeff Sparrow in Fascists Among Us
“If Donald Trump is the Next Hitler then I am joining his SS to put an end to Monotheist Question. All Zionist Jews, All Christians who do not follow Christ’s teachings of Love, Charity, and Forgiveness And All Jihadi Muslims are going to Madagascar or the Ovens/FEMA Camps!!! Does this make me a fascist!!!”- Facebook post by Proud Boy affiliated Patriot Prayer rally supporter and murderer Jeremy Joseph Christian, as reported by Andy Campbell in We Are Proud Boys
On occasion, in reading the works I compiled for my Against Fascism essays here, it can all seem a little theoretical. Is it accurate, or technical, to describe the current state of the Republican Party in the US or the Modi administration in India, for instance, as fascist? Is the term best reserved for some of the historical ideologies of early twentieth-century Europe, or does it have utility as a descriptor for strains of reactionary politics elsewhere in history, even to today?
Whether you understand the arguments that a fascist populism has returned to mainstream politics as sober reporting or hyperbolic fear-mongering, the other side as complacent dismissals or measured skepticism, it can feel disconnected to the day-to-day political reality lived by people in the present moment. One horrifying part of this lived reality is the continuing threat of violence. Horrifying terrorist attacks have, over the past decade, claimed hundreds of lives, from Oslo to Charleston, Christchurch to San Antonio, Pittsburgh to Rochester, Uvalde to Colorado Springs, to only name a few, often using the same language and rhetoric as the mainstream right-wing, citing things like the threat that immigration and LGBTQ+ rights have on traditional Western culture and railing against the “cultural elites’’ allowing this to happen. This is a phenomenon increasingly described as “stochastic terrorism,” defined by scholars from German non-profit organization the Max Planck Institute as “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable,” or as Mother Jones puts it, an “instigator provokes extremist violence under the guise of plausible deniability.”
To better understand this dynamic, and how much influence political ideology really has on mass shootings, I sought out accounts of historians and journalists reporting on these atrocities as they study the more concrete, worrying effects that the rhetoric of politicians, influencers, and their policies have on the public. This was not often easy reading, but I felt a dark pull to learn more, a feeling common, I think, to aficionados of the true crime genre. Taken together, the books I’ve read for this entry illustrate changes in approaching the topic as journalists struggle with how to frame, understand, and oppose violent extremism, highlighting both the insights and failures of this reporting. In trying to build accurate and comprehensive accounts of such horrific events and explain their context and implications in a continuously evolving and shifting political climate, reporters began to question their approaches. For instance, how best to discuss the motives of an attack without contributing to their intended messages, or whether, for instance, we should even use the names of the perpetrators in question? All in all, I think it’s important to note that fascist impulses toward violence did not come out of nowhere in 2016, but have been building for years, even decades. Stoked by the right-wing media, but incubated for far longer.
US historian Kathleen Belew illustrates this in Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018), her exhaustive and comprehensive account of the white power movement in the United States in the late twentieth century, a “leaderless” organization that led to many murders, including the most infamous pre-9/11 terrorist attack in US history, the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. A dense but meticulously researched work, Belew makes clear the connections between various fascist, racialist, and other far-right organizations and their origins among alienated Vietnam War veterans. Similar to the “stab in the back” mythology of post-WWI Germany, ideologically committed veterans of the unpopular Vietnam War focused their military training, their racism, and their anti-communist paranoia on building anti-government paramilitary groups across the US.
Shattering the conception of white power terrorists as being just unbalanced lone wolves, Belew’s research remains all too relevant and presages much of the current threat of committed white nationalist violence we continue to face. Even as mainstream media and society viewed them as irrelevant buffoons, the criminal organizations established by these groups, such as The Order, engaged in campaigns of assassination and armed robbery to build their arsenals. Abusing immigrants in Texas, murdering activists in North Carolina, and building their influence in militia groups across the country, the white power movement worked to bring down the US government and set up a genocidal theocracy in its place. In particular, the success of such white power groups in using their ill-gotten wealth to establish some of the first online hubs of fascist belief on the internet.
Belew’s work provides a vivid and disturbing background of the ideological base of many contemporary far-right actors and their commitment to extreme violence in the advancement of their goals. Most worryingly, even after the horror of the Oklahoma City Bombing and Timothy McVeigh’s direct ties to groups like the Order, they were able to remain relatively ignored even as they continued to build their rhetorical strategies in their online spaces. By the 2010s, as the far right began to gain strength throughout the world, some of the attitudes held by members of the Order and other militia movements Belew described oozed into the popular language of mainstream rightwing parties, especially through the medium of Islamophobia.
Two of the worst attacks in the last decade or so, Oslo, Norway in 2011 and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 each reflect this, each shocking in the horror and brutality they brought to countries with long reputations as being peaceful and removed from the threat of extremist violence. Both also show the evolution of reporting on these events as the international online reach of reactionary ideologies became clearer and closer to the surface. In their works reporting on the perpetrators of these events, the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad and Australian Jeff Sparrow provide insight into this shift.
In One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, published in Norway in 2013, Seierstad writes an exhaustive account of Norwegian mass murderer and white nationalist Anders Bering Breivik’s sickening 2011 mass killing of more than sixty teenage members of the AUF (Workers Youth League), a group affiliated with Norway’s Labour Party, after bombing Norway’s parliament building. Throughout her comprehensive work, she builds a detailed profile of Breivik’s life up to the point of his appalling massacre and his eventual trial, alternating between Breivik’s mundane biography and the lives of the optimistic young activists he remorselessly gunned down. Juxtaposing these passionate lives cut short with the hateable stupidity of the murderer, Seierstad writes a disturbing, harrowing, but ultimately unsatisfying read.
By delving deeply into the trials testimony, witness accounts, and other documentary evidence, Seierstad tries to understand how such darkness could have erupted from one of Norway’s own citizens, but her novelistic account of Breivik’s terrorism and his motives gives it a slightly speculative, sensationalistic aspect. Seierstad was chronicling the first public explosion of far-right terrorism at least since the Oklahoma City Bombing, though at the time she understandably lacked the context that would soon be evident as stochastic terrorism entered into the public lexicon. However, it’s not as if Norway was free from neo-fascist rhetoric even by the turn of the 21st century, and a sense of complacency was one of the work’s major themes for me as the Norwegian authorities seemed utterly stymied that something bad was happening there.
Reading this book from the position of 2023, it’s hard to miss the many parallels between Breivik and the other terrorists who have followed after him, such as his drift from libertarian to fascist, his connection with online gaming, and his citing the work of mainstream conservative pundits as fueling his desire to battle what he sees as the forces of evil ruining his nation. Seierstad includes Breivik using common right-wing talking points like “cultural Marxism” and what has come to be called the “Great Replacement Theory,” that “elites” are importing immigrants to “flood the country” and destroy traditional values. In this, he shares a toxic rhetoric that, from a Norway lost in confusion in grief, has now been spoken from the White House to 10 Downing Street. Indeed, inspiring others to continue his fight was explicitly one of Breivik’s goals, as he wrote he hoped to “inspire thousands of other revolutionary conservative nationalists, anti-communists, and anti-Islamists throughout the European world.” Over the decade since, his act became a point of reference for other followers of white power action in their own terrorist attacks, from Christchurch to Buffalo.
In Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre, Australian journalist Jeff Sparrow writes a concise, informative account of the horrific Christchurch massacre in 2019, as the terrorist he calls “Person X” followed his Norwegian predecessor’s tactics. In contrast to Seierstad’s deep dive into every aspect of Breivik’s life, Sparrow’s use of a euphemistic placeholder for the terrorists’ name makes a good case for how deemphasizing the perpetrator himself allows us to focus on the horrifying contents of his chilling manifesto, which was also written to inspire his fellow fascists. Sketching out a short history of fascist thought since the 1940s, Sparrow parses out the background of the ideas espoused by Person X in his manifesto released online, including his interest in pre and post-WWII British fascist Oswald Mosley, his advocacy of pseudo environmentalist “Eco-Fascism,” and especially his virulent Islamophobia.
Discussing the role of the internet in radicalizing Person X, Sparrow shows how white power movements continue to excel at spreading their discourse online through the ironic play common in online spaces, struggling to bridge the gap between the digital world and an offline political project. One of the most interesting sections highlights this by discussing the obscure Australian fascist scene that radicalized Person X, and how even the most seemingly inconsequential fascist groups can spawn deadly terrorism, aided in unmoderated online communication connecting people across far distances in Australia and the US alike. Thankfully, Sparrow ends the account on a hopeful note, detailing how anti-fascist activism can counter at least some of this fascist organizing, following the success of those opposed to Mosley’s own activities in the UK. By challenging bigotry and racist thinking of all kinds, online and off, one can negate the radicalization drawing angry young men into their company, discouraging recruitment.
US journalist Dick Lehr’s 2021 work White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland takes a different focus on reporting on the growth of right-wing terrorist organizing. Lehr frames his gripping true crime account of a foiled plot against the Somali population of Garden City, Kansas by a white nationalist militia group calling itself the Crusaders 2.0 through the work of law enforcement and their informant on the inside in preventing this attack. From stumbling upon the shocking extent of the hatred among his local conservative political network to the tactics used by his contacts in the FBI to track, observe, contain, and ultimately prosecute the conspirators, the informant’s story was a stressful, suspenseful, and inspiring tale.
While the FBI has considered white power groups the top threat in domestic terrorism since at least 2015, the government has, in general, devoted fewer resources to combating it than to civil rights groups, so it is a feel-good story to see them take these guys down. However, some of the tactics used by the FBI here in their campaign against the Crusaders, however successful in the end, were a little ethically questionable, I feel. By pushing the line of ethics, it may work to exacerbate the situation as in the case of the infamous and deadly blunders at Waco and Ruby Ridge, especially as some of the major vectors contributing to this radicalization online remain all but unregulated.
On that note, the continued influence of right-wing media and online communication in threatening the lives of marginalized groups was very evident here, even among this group of not exactly “very online” types. The vile hatred of these men, stoked by the rhetoric of Trump on platforms like Facebook, planning to bomb and gun down hundreds of Muslim citizens was disturbing. Their defense lawyers in the trial as reported by Lehr even motioned Trump’s influence “bearing responsibility” as a way to ask for leniency.
Taking a look at all three of these cases, we can see how the perpetrators were radicalized at various times, taking up the apocalyptic language of reactionary politicians, influencers, and personalities spread so widely online. Whether or not this was a conscious strategy, they each took these messages of supposed threats to their existence as white men in Western countries to their logical end. They were the extreme few who, in the concept of stochastic terrorism, fulfilled the mission that they felt fell to them. This link between political rhetoric and action is explored in the latest book I read discussing far-right violence, the US journalist Andy Campbell’s We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism.
In We Are Proud Boys, Campbell discusses many of the themes we’ve seen so far, taking a deep dive into the origins, goals, messaging, and actions of the Proud Boys, who have come to be a ubiquitous fixture of right-wing violence. Writing in a casual, engaging style, without downplaying the gravity of the situation the Proud Boys represent as they directly advocate for and practice violence against their political opponents in the streets and, via their links to lawmakers, through legislation. They represent a perfect encapsulation of the trend of? stochastic terrorism, as a bombastic way to direct rage, harassment, and physical violence towards opponents, as we’ve seen throughout the country in recent months as Proud Boy members threaten and bully Drag Queen story hours in conjunction with the far right’s campaign against “grooming.”
Violence against their political opponents and those they reject as un-American remains the major mission of the group, keeping the tradition established by ex-founder, edgy Canadian immigrant asshole Gavin McIness. From the infamous and deadly explosions of fascist rage at Charlottesville in 2017 and the 2021 Capitol insurrection to their perennial agitating in Portland, members of the Proud Boys have been on the front lines of advocating and participating in violence. Whether glorifying acts of political assassination like the 1960 killing of Japanese socialist representative Inejirō Asanuma by an ultranationalist student, reenacted by McInnes himself, or bragging about the number of leftists they have personally assaulted, it is an organization consumed by toxic posturing and thirst for physical confrontation. In particular, Campbell focuses on Portland as the scene for much of the campaign of terror wrought by the Proud Boys and their affiliated groups, like Patriot Prayer, including Jeremy Joseph Campbell, who stabbed three men in 2017, killing two after threatening Muslim passengers on the MAX light rail.
Campbell illustrates the disturbing influence of the group among mainstream Republicans, including law enforcement, as they maintain a successful facade as diverse and patriotic, even as they base their group on McInnis’ exhortations to “celebrate nationalism, reject multiculturalism and immigration, keep women at home, and punch anyone who disagrees.” Campbell’s reporting deftly links much of the Proud Boy’s funding to mainstream Republican groups, for instance, even after their legal problems following the January 6th. Most interestingly, he devotes a lot of analysis to how journalists can effectively report on such extremists without falling into the trap of repeating their platitudes.
In the United States, though, more than anything else, gun violence remains the most harrowing threat, of which ideological terrorism is only a particularly virulent form, muddling the political and social reasons why some men, especially white men, feel compelled to vent their frustrations on the public using high powered firearms. Mass shootings are a perennial and terrible aspect of our national experience, and a couple of books I read tackled the issue from this angle. Gun culture, gender, racist politics, the US medical system, and media saturation all blur into each other, and establishing direct motives or causes for such incomprehensible violence can become difficult and beside the point.
In their concise 2021 work The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, the Twin Cities-based academics Jillian Peterson and James Densley report on their findings from building a database and researching the backgrounds and circumstances of the increase of mass shootings going back to the 1960 University of Texas attack. Through the lenses of their disciplines, psychology and sociology, Peterson and Densley highlight the complex nature of these issues, discussing some commonalities between them, both cultural and personal, whether they are rage killings in the workplace or more ideologically motivated attacks. Including histories of abuse, a specific crisis point, exposure to reporting on previous shooters, and opportunity, Peterson and Densley write a compelling examination of factors leading to mass shootings, missing only a more in-depth discussion of political instigation of these attacks in US politics, specifically the stochastic terrorism concept.
As a whole, they offer some concrete ideas that might be instituted in our society to try to cut down on these tragedies, including some ideas on gun regulation as well as stricter ethics in reporting on mass shootings, similar to the ideas discussed by Sparrow and Campbell earlier.
Finally, in his slim 2023 book Bloodbath Nation, renowned novelist Paul Auster writes a blistering essay on gun control and the US obsession with firearms around a collection of stark images of the scenes of various American mass shootings courtesy of photographer Spencer Ostrander. These pictures, striking only in their normality, scenes of everyday American geography where tragedy occurred, serve as a disturbing reminder of Auster’s topic. Wrestling with the ramifications of US gun culture, our fraught history of racism and genocide, and where our second amendment liberties clash with our desire for freedom from violence, Auster questions how we got here. While his arguments are strong and his prose affecting, I also feel that he doesn’t really break new ground here, either, and I’m not sure I learned anything new from Bloodbath Nation. Which feels like, I think, an appropriate note to conclude on.
Even as I feel compelled to seek out resources like the books I collected here, trying to understand more deeply the complex web of culture and politics that shape the violence in our world, to grasp where we are as a historical moment, on my less optimistic moments, I wonder how much these accounts can do to help. My morbid curiosity may be, for the moment, sated, but can even the most precise research and clear reporting break through the self-created webs of misinformation clouding the world? As a library worker and a student of history, I put my hope in freedom of information, that a better understanding of the issues will lead to best practices for pushing back against it, making for a safer and more peaceful society. But fascism creates its own reality, and as is made clear by these books, violence is an effective tool for maintaining it.
The reasonable reforms that Peterson and Densley advocate, for instance, such as a ban on high-capacity magazines and de-platforming hate speech, and being cautious in reporting on the minutiae of shooter’s lives, all shown to be effective measures to combat mass shootings, seem to have little chance of wide implementation in the US. It can be tempting to believe that the refusal to pass such measures by the US right is a deliberate strategy to tacitly encourage violence against their opponents. However, of course, it is mostly the case that those in power blocking these reforms view it as an unfortunate side effect of their policies and ideology that is simply not important enough for them or their constituents to care about. And in the end, don’t each of these scenarios basically amount to each other in practice?
On that note, these works can provide valuable information to those who just might be swayed enough to moderate their policies on these issues. Hiding behind issues of the Constitution, the First and Second Amendments, often ends up depriving those very same rights from those with the least representation in this country.