Behind the Curtain: Popular Culture Roots of the Alternative Right in the Euro-American Realm
BJ Bruther is a historian and instructor emeritus from Marian University Indianapolis.
Have people in the United States and Europe of the twenty-first century fallen into the same trap as the generation of World War I, which fell under the glamour of dangerous political myths? Yes, they have fallen into the trap, for behind the curtain of QAnon and other conspiracist sites online and in print are elaborate myths generated from humanity’s darkest histories which have been made popular again. One of the darkest political myths has been the “blood libel,” which is the belief that the Jewish community sacrifices a Christian child in imitation of the passion of the Christ. This political myth is linked to ideas about white supremacy and racial hierarchies popularized in British imperial adventure literature. This imperial adventure literature provides the base for today’s popular culture from which the alternative Right draws its agenda, revealing its anachronistic, ahistorical, and nostalgic vision of the modern world.
Ernst Cassirer sounded the alarm at the end of the World War II. He maintained that “the most alarming feature in this development of modern political thought is the appearance of new power: the power of mythical thought.”[1] He lamented, “When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed to take them seriously. By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake. We should not commit the same error a second time.”[2] Dismissing the power of such political myths is dangerous—these myths are “impervious to rational arguments” or not easily “refuted by syllogisms.” They are “invulnerable.”[3] They can become deeply embedded in one’s imagination through the medium of popular culture: stories, music, and films. Compelling, simplistic, emotionally (and musically) driven narratives have real staying power in the imagination.[4] Humans then “mold the facts to fit our preexisting opinions, and not the other way around . . . we fall prey to confirmation bias and cling to those facts most consistent with our beliefs and intentionally ignore those that disconfirm them.”[5]
The “blood libel” first appeared in twelfth century England in and around the city of Norwich following the death of a Christian child, William, under mysterious circumstances. Nearly thirty years after the incident, a cleric, Thomas of Monmouth, popularized William’s death as one of martyrdom, hoping to bring pilgrims and money into the local economy. He blamed local Jewish individuals for the boy’s death. According to him, those individuals had kidnapped William for ritual purposes and butchered him in the same manner as Christ.[6] Although the story left a light footprint in the historical record, more accusations followed, some leading to trials and executions, leaving behind official records.[7] New elements were added to the “blood libel” narrative: a shadowy council of rabbis who decreed that a particular European Jewish community carry out the annual ritual sacrifice around Passover and the drinking or consumption of the child’s blood.[8] Medieval and early modern popes and secular rulers often discounted these ritual murder narratives; yet, they did not condemn them publicly in official documents. When a toddler named Simon vanished in the city of Trent, the myth gained new power in 1475. Once the boy’s body had been found in a canal running under a Jewish home on Easter Day, the local bishop, Johannes Hinderbach maintained that the local Jewish community had selected Simon for ritual sacrifice on the first night of Passover. According to Magda Teter, “what is known comes primarily from sources created or preserved by Bishop Johannes Hinderbach . . . and his allies [which] shaped the public memory of Simon’s death and the trial that ensued; they also shaped the historical records on which later scholars have relied.”[9] Hinderbach and his allies were what today might be called spin doctors. They carried out a “sophisticated, and not inexpensive, public campaign” [which] “was quite successful.”[10] Local Jewish individuals were arrested, judicially tortured, tried, and executed for the child’s death.
From the point of view of the Catholic Church, the Tridentine trial of those individuals for young Simon’s murder had been entirely valid and legal. After all, for centuries, the Church had condemned Jewish people as the killers of Christ, at Easter and in masses. Even Pope Benedict XIV repeated the phrase “cruelly killed by Jews in hatred of the Christian faith” in his letter about the death of a child, Beatus Andreas, in the mid-eighteenth century. The letter simply “validated the charge and thus the historicity of similar stories passed on in European chronicles.” Hence, it “became a new authoritative source for the proponents of anti-Jewish accusations. To be sure, the pope never affirmed the “blood libel” accusation—according to Benedict the murders were in odio—but that distinction would be lost on future accusers.”[11] Protestant churches often adhered to the same discourse. And so through the medium of multiple printings--chapbooks, ballads, broadsheets, and illustrations--the stories of ritual murders of Christian children at the hands of Jewish people were popularized and spread widely throughout Europe and Russia.
Jewish people had been demonized for centuries, called the sons of Satan, and carefully separated from Christian society through isolation in specified locations, through regulated occupations, and through particular clothing and badges. Stereotypes were reinforced in printed popular literature and stage plays, as seen in the characterization of Shylock in Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, which further developed the stereotype of the avaricious, letter of the law Jewish money lender.[12]
In the nineteenth century, a wave of emancipations swept through the European and American world—Catholic emancipation in Ireland, Jewish emancipation in Europe, and enslaved peoples freed worldwide. Jewish people had become an indistinguishable segment of a liberal and urban society. It seemed that many Jewish people had become the champions of new political ideas, born of the new urban industrialized society, anarchism, socialism, and communism, which threatened the ordained order of the world.[13] Concurrently, Robert Knox and Count Arthur de Gobineau popularized the idea that humankind was divided into “distinct and permanent races” through their books, The Races of Men (1850) and Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1854). The focus of this new racial science was on such markers as “skin colour, facial features, texture of hair, and with the growing influence of phrenology, size and shape of the skull, . . . each race was innately associated with distinct social, cultural and moral traits. . . . races could be graded in a coherent hierarchy of talent and beauty, with whites on the top and blacks at the bottom.”[14] This new racial science maintained that Jewish people were biologically different—a separate and inferior people. What had started as a religious hatred directed at Jewish people who were blamed for the death of Jesus Christ (and their failure to recognize the Christian messiah) became an economic blame game in the early modern period that would harden into a biologically based racialism by the end of the nineteenth century.
An outbreak of virulent anti-Semitism in both Republican France and Imperial Russia led an Austrian writer, Theodor Herzl, to seek an answer to this terrible hatred in the late nineteenth century. He turned to nationalism--the idea that the Jewish people needed a nation of their own—a new Zion. Ethnically based nations had become normative in Europe, as both Germany and Italy became nations, and other ethnicities sought independence in Ireland and Eastern Europe, fighting against their British and Russian overlords. The blood libel itself never went away. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a text called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, building on the old stereotypes, maintained that . . . there exists a secret Jewish government which through a world-wide network of camouflaged agencies and organizations, controls political parties and governments, the press, and public opinion, banks and economic developments. The secret government is supposed to be doing this in pursuance of an age-old plan and with single aim of achieving Jewish domination over the entire world; and it is supposed to be perilously near to achieving this aim.[15]
This particular myth and the previous linkage of Jewish people to socialism/communism played a role in the Holocaust, 1939–1945.[16] After the Holocaust, at least in Europe and the United States, this political myth and the Protocols faded into the backwaters of the extreme Right. The extreme Right relabeled the “secret Jewish government” imagined in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), and tightly associated it with the state of Israel which was considered to have a secret influence on governments in Europe and the United States. American Protestant evangelicals, in particular, had problems with the idea of ZOG. For them, the creation of Israel was a harbinger of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in their vision of history. Jewish people were not a problem, for the Second Coming would lead to their mass conversion. Feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, abortion, and teaching about such ideas in public school were the real threats.[17]
Although “we like to assume that the arc of history will bend inexorably toward justice,” this may be “wishful thinking,” for “unmediated social media” has modified language, and our understanding of “who we are.”[18] QAnon, the spokes site for the anonymous poster, Q, has become the most popular purveyor of these restructured and repurposed anti-Semitic myths, which in their new form have been popularized on Fox News and by Trump (and his administration). According to the followers of the anonymous Q, “the criminals are also known as the Deep State, or cabal, because of how they control things behind the scenes.”[19] The criminals are represented in the United States by William Jefferson Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and most especially Barack Hussein Obama. For Q and his followers, the only heroic American figures fighting the criminal elite were Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
You must learn. . . that it was the CRIMINALS all along . . . They rose to the top of media companies that control our news and entertainment. They ascended to the top of the banking system . . . They became leaders of agricultural companies who have control over the food supply. Also big pharmaceutical companies . . . First they accumulated the world’s wealth. They invented a system of money called Central Banking which lends money to governments with interest, placing countries into eternal debt . . . So they used their control of media to set black against white, woman against man, young against old, Muslim against Christian . . . To get it done faster, they attacked all aspects of humanity that make us strong. Like family. Using their influence over culture, they popularized lifestyle choices that led to a surge in broken homes, lost youth and substance abuse.”[20]
To the followers of Q the Deep State has links to the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, George Soros, the House of Saud, the Rothschild family, and a cabal of Satan-worshiping globalists and pedophiles, often called the New World Order.[21] According to Q’s followers, George Soros, a particular target, and his Open Society Foundation, supports the New World Order agenda, directing his donations “toward Progressive Communist Leftist causes and ultra-liberal programs” which support “open borders, unlimited illegal immigration” [and sponsors] Black Lives Matter.”[22] The Deep State has supported “[t]he purest of pure evil—beyond theft, corruption, murder, and blackmail—. . . the kidnapping, torture, raping, and sacrifice of children. The perpetrators are Luciferian and Satan-worshippers. They run pedophile networks across continents through the Vatican, and underneath the cover of charities and child protective services.”[23] Q and his followers maintain that the elites are worshippers of Satan, who raise their consciousness and stay youthful through drinking the blood of ritually sacrificed children obtaining a natural chemical called adrenochrome, a repurposed version of the “blood libel.”[24]
Q and his followers consistently link multiculturalism, women’s rights, and homosexual civil rights to the destruction of small-town and rural life in the United States. They present themselves as champions of traditional values, stating “[w]ithout a nuclear family, held together by a genetic male husband and genetic female wife, we are doomed. The global elites’ goal is an end to monogamy, God-given gender, and normal procreation.”[25] They see any critique of American history or the “Western Canon” as “Common Core/Scrubbed History Indoctrination.”[26] Prior to and during the current pandemic, they have advocated for “no elite forced vaccination.”[27] They see Hollywood and Washington, D.C., working hand in hand to spread the New World Order agenda worldwide, linking popular films to messages supporting women’s rights, African American and homosexual civil rights, and even the notion of child sacrifice.[28] Q and his followers hope for a “Great Awakening” and “The Storm,” language choices that link Q to white supremacists in the United States, advocates of the far Right worldwide, and historically to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party.
A strong link has been forged between Q supporters, evangelical Protestants, and white supremacists based upon fear—all of whom fear loss of their privileged position in society. They see themselves as a pure people threatened on all sides. They see ruin ahead, leading inexorably to white genocide and the dominance of the “mud people” (people of color).[29] The core idea of the white supremacist movement is a simple statement, known as the fourteen words, “[w]e must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”[30] They find comfort in this statement. They will not be replaced, as long as they take action to reinforce traditional gender roles, enforce the racial hierarchy, and turn their backs on a truly democratic society—one where all people get to participate. They are asked to join a newly awakened brotherhood of those who see the truth, those who have taken the red pill. He (and it is most likely a disaffected white male) becomes a soldier in the Storm, the coming struggle to save white people from replacement and genocide. He thinks of himself as a hero, a new Neo[31], which is ironic since Neo, in the 1999 film The Matrix, from which the red pill moment is taken, is the hated cultural Marxist, a social justice warrior.[32] What is truly striking about this scenario is the utter poverty of the alt Right’s collective imaginations. Their agenda is simply recycled narratives based upon late Victorian (imperial) British adventure tales, American pulp fiction, and recent Hollywood blockbusters.
Today, commentators express surprise at the ease with which Americans (and Europeans) embrace the latest conspiracy. Yet, it is no surprise; popular culture reinforces such beliefs, far beyond The Matrix and its red pill. Secret societies are at the center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), either composed of earth-born or alien elites hiding themselves from the world but influencing it for good or ill. They appear in virtually every film, beginning with Iron Man (2008) and continuing in the film, Eternals (2021). One of the central characters, Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a classic superhero, a privileged white male, a man of wealth, who takes on a secret identity, as a result of adversity, gains a conscience, and joins a U.S. government–sponsored secret society, the Avengers, bent on protecting the world from domestic foes, in particular that survivor of the Third Reich, Hydra, and extra-terrestrial foes, such as Thanos, the Mad Titan.[33] The MCU is based upon comic books and graphic novels, which in turn were based upon American pulp fiction, which in turn were based upon late Victorian (imperial) adventure stories. It all started as Europeans and later Americans established empires located in Africa and Asia in the late nineteenth century. As cartographers filled in the blank spaces of the world, late Victorian writers of adventure stories embraced the fast-disappearing blank spots on the map, imagining hidden lost civilizations and ever-expanding frontiers, on earth and in space.
Late Victorian adventure story writers, such as Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram (Abraham) Stoker, have anchored their stories in the racial science of their time, popularizing those ideas in their stories, which highlight white male privilege and Western dominance. A surprising character bolstered their ideas, paradoxically, as she was a purveyor of Eastern spiritualism and known anti-imperialist, Madame Helena Blavatsky, Russian émigré and founder of theosophy, through her comprehensive occult history of the world, The Secret Doctrine.[34] Blavatsky created her own racial hierarchy in her history—she emphasized the idea of the Root Race, the first and second, possibly the Hyperboreans, were unknowable, without bodies, pure energy; the third Root Race was corporeal, and of the sunken continent Lemuria, the Fourth Root Race was from Atlantis, and the Fifth Root Race was Aryan (and incorporated the Semite and Turanian). She projected that there would be two additional Root Races, one born of America, and the other born from the Sixth in some far distant future. Blavatsky linked the Aryan and the swastika in her text.[35] Her popularization of Ignatius Donnelly’s Lemuria, Plato’s Atlantis, and her own creation of the Hyperboreans would influence later American pulp fiction and comic books. Her attitude toward the racial hierarchy was contradictory, “[m]ankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders is inexplicable on any other grounds.” She was convinced that a sacred spark, an essence, was missing from those islanders, the “Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes.”[36] Yet just a few pages later, she could say “[A]nd it is the descendants of those of our highly cultured nations, who might have survived on some island without any means of crossing the new seas, that would fall back into a state of relative savagery. Thus, the reason given for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy.”[37] She also linked her history of mankind to the late Victorian (imperial) adventure story directly, lauding the novels She (1887) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887), seeing the stories as dreams of reality.[38]
Late Victorian scientists, especially those studying criminality, such as Cesare Lombroso, focused on the concept of atavism, the idea of savage primitive man reappearing among modern men, and using it to explain the behavior of violent criminal offenders.[39] Stevenson uses this idea as the base of his novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Henry Jekyll is a wealthy physician, charitable and kind, who develops a potion which allows his atavistic self to manifest in a “pale, dwarfish” man with a “displeasing smile” and a “murderous mixture of timidity and boldness”[40], known as Edward Hyde. Everyone who encounters Hyde has the same reaction: “[H]e is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable . . . He must be deformed somewhere,”[41] When the narrator encounters Hyde, he feels not only an immediate hatred, but also a strong nausea. Hyde manifests his primitive urges in violent actions, trampling a small child and later beating an elderly man, Sir Danvers Carew, to death in front of witnesses. Jekyll buys off the parents of the small child, as she was from a poor family, to prevent Hyde’s arrest, and later he commits suicide to avoid responsibility and loss of reputation for Carew’s death.[42]
Even the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, reinforces this idea of atavism in his novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. He describes the Notting Hill killer, Selden, as individual of “peculiar ferocity” and “wanton brutality”, whose first appearance shocks the reader, “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides . . . small cunning eyes . . . a crafty savage animal” Doyle makes the link with primitive man obvious, calling Selden, a “short, squat, strongly built figure.” Sherlock Holmes labels the main villain of the tale, Stapleton, as a physical and spiritual throwback to the originator of the curse, Sir Hugo Baskerville, a “wild, profane and godless man.”[43]
White male privilege and supremacy were the cornerstones of one of the great adventure novels of the late Victorian era, She, published in 1887. The novel opens dramatically, Ludwig Horace Holly, an intellectual and future Cambridge mathematics professor, is approached by a dying former student to be the guardian of his five-year-old son, Leo Vincey, and a mysterious locked iron box. During a lengthy conversation, Holly agrees to take the iron box and hold it in trust for the boy until young Leo reaches his twenty-fifth year. The dying man also outlines a rigorous program of study for his son, one of which includes higher mathematic, plus the Greek and Arabic languages. He settles a lifetime income on Holly for taking on this guardianship. Holly has many misgivings, being today what is called an involuntary celibate (incel). He describes himself as an atavistic individual more akin to primitive man in appearance, short, thick-set, and deep-chested almost to deformity, with long, sinewy arms, heavy features, hollow grey eyes, a low brow half overgrown with a mop of thick black hair . . . Like Cain, I was branded—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers . . . Women hated the sight of me . . . Once indeed, a woman pretended to care for me, and I lavished all the pent-up affection of my nature upon her. Then money that was to have come to me went elsewhere, and she discarded me.[44]
When the boy arrives at his lodgings, Holly determines to follow his instructions to the letter. He will have no interference, “I would have no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his affections from me. The boy was old enough to do without female assistance, so I set to work to find a suitable male attendant.”[45] The boy Leo grew into a beautiful young man, “his eyes were grey, his forehead broad, and his face, even at that early age, clean cut as a cameo . . . his hair, which was pure gold in colour and tightly curled over his shapely head.”[46] At age twenty-five, Leo, a young Apollo in appearance, and Holly, nicknamed Charon, retrieved the iron box, opened it, studied the contents, several short manuscripts, pot fragments, and a scarab, and embarked on a quest. It takes them to an unknown kingdom located in East Africa.
There, they meet the dictatorial ruler of a forgotten African kingdom, protected by a vast swamp and mountains, She-who-must-be-obeyed. As Holly enters her presence, he witnesses the power that she has over the local tribesmen, who immediately drop to the ground and crawl on their bellies to her feet. Holly thinks, “I am an Englishman and why, I asked myself, should I creep into the presence of some savage woman as though I were a monkey in fact as well as in name?”[47] He walks upright into her presence, and is stunned to discover, that unlike the tribal community, a “yellowish” people with “cold and sullen cruelty stamped upon” their faces “that revolted”[48] him, She-who-must-be-obeyed is a beautiful white woman. To Holly, steeped in classical history, She is a Circe, a powerful being, of great “beauty and purity,” but “evil.”[49] He discovers that this woman has isolated herself in this forgotten kingdom for two thousand years, awaiting the return of her lover, Kallikrates, who has been reborn in the form of his lineal descendant, Leo Vincey. She has had no impact on the world, preferring a passive life in a forgotten kingdom, indulging herself in cruel and capricious behavior directed at her subjects. Once she sees young Leo, however, she pledges her “utter and absolute devotion” to the young man, offering him eternal life at her side, as her husband and she, a subservient wife.[50] She pledges, “[b]ehold in token of submission do I bow me to my lord!” She “will cherish Good and abandon Evil, “eschew Ambition”, and “set Wisdom over me as a ruling star to led me unto Truth and a knowledge of the Right.”[51] Having seen young Leo fall under her spell and her unrestrained and emotional behavior, Holly fears for the world. He “had little doubt she would assume rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth . . . at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.”[52] At the end of the tale, white male privilege and supremacy is restored, She-who-must-be-obeyed is destroyed in the rolling Pillar of Fire that gives eternal life.
Embedded in She was another fear of the late Victorian age: the fear of the immigrant, who brought a degenerate racial component into the white world, a fear more directly expressed in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Like She-who-must-be-obeyed, Dracula lives in a forgotten region of the world, the Carpathian Mountains (present day Romania). For centuries he has been content to live in his ancestral holdings, draining the local peasants of their blood, but longs for new fresh blood. He determines to leave his mountains for England. Once in England, he brings his thirst for blood into a new population, bringing about deadly contagion, a pandemic from the East into London and its environs. He infects two individuals, a young aristocrat, Lucy Westenra, and a delusional man, Renfield, with his blood lust. Both are degenerate representations of his blood lust; Lucy preys on children and Renfield, on insects and small animals.[53] His infection is countered through the efforts of stalwart white Anglo-Saxon males who destroy the dangerous immigrant in their midst, chasing him back to his ancestral home, destroying him.
An English writer bridged the gap between late Victorian (imperial) adventure stories and American pulp fiction—Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward). Although he is best known for his creation of the master criminal from East Asia, Fu Manchu, his novel, Brood of the Witch Queen, reasserts many of the late Victorian (imperial) adventure story themes of white supremacy, male privilege, racial degeneration, and fear of the immigrant. The hero of the tale is Robert Cairn, “a tall, thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, square jawed, and with the crisp light hair and gray eyes which often bespeak unusual virility”[54]; the villain, Anthony Ferrara, a “statuesque ivory face . . . over-red lips . . . long glittering dark eyes . . . beneath the straightly penciled brows, . . . Save for the short, lustreless hair it was the face of a handsome evil woman.”[55] Anthony may be a Scotsman of Spanish descent and a student at Oxford, but he lives in in super-heated rooms scented with heavy incense, surrounded by statues of Egyptian deities, ancient preserved mummies, and antique scrolls and manuscripts.[56] Ferrara preys upon members of London society, Lord Lashmore, the descendant of a Polish Jewess and vampire, and his wife, a South American beauty and medium who are already contaminated genetically, opening them to Ferrara’s baleful influence. Cairn believes that Ferrara practices murderous black magic, for Anthony’s father and Lord Lashmore have both died unexpectedly. Cairn had witnessed the violent death of a white swan, following an arcane ceremony in Ferrara’s dwelling. Ferrara flees to Egypt, where locals claim an out-of-season windstorm, a “hot wind had been caused by an Efreet, a sort of Arabian Night’s demon, who has arrived in Egypt”[57] to Robert Cairn. Ferrara hopes to kill those who stand between him and the Ferrara family fortune. He is the child of a magic ritual carried out in Egypt in 1893, upon the discovery of the tomb of a powerful magician, the lover of the Egyptian witch queen, and their mummified child. Bruce Cairn, the father of Robert, and Michael Ferrara had brought the child to life, and Ferrara had raised him as his son.[58] Robert Cairn prevents Ferrara’s plan to claim the fortune and destroy those who knew of his origin, burning the Book of Thoth, freeing a fire demon that destroys Anthony Ferrara.[59] Robert Cairn is a white male, destroying a hidden danger to an august family lineage, preventing its contagion of other lineages and subsequent racial degeneration of the English elite.
Repeating many of the themes in the late Victorian (imperial) adventure, white supremacy, male privilege, and those of contagion and degeneracy, in his novels, Arthur Grace Merritt communicated them to his friend, Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the American pulp fiction writing community. Merritt made more use of the ideas of Madame Helena Blavatsky in his novels than Sax Rohmer, the other transitional figure in the community, introducing those ideas to an American audience. Both Atlantis and Lemuria make frequent appearances in his works, as do mysterious otherworldly mentors of great antiquity and power. The Moon Pool published in 1919, offers a deep excursion into the typical Merritt adventure tale. The narrator encounters an old friend on a ship to Melbourne, Australia, scientist David Throckmartin, who has just fled from his archaeological site near Papua New Guinea. Throckmartin, his wife, and a young associate had left behind the civilized world to study a “group of island ruins clustered along the eastern shores of Ponape in the Carolines. . . . twin centres of a colossal riddle of humanity, a weird flower of civilization that blossomed ages before the seeds of Egypt were sown; of whose arts we know little enough and of whose science nothing. . . . cyclopean, megalithic harbours.”[60] Throckmartin tells the narrator of the moon path and the manifestation of its evil spirit, a shining being, “unearthly and androgynous”, accompanied by otherworldly music that he once dismissed as crass native superstition. It had abducted his young wife, Edith, and his young associate. He wants to return with an army of white men, so that he can reclaim the lost. The moon path takes Throckmartin, so the narrator endeavors to take up the quest.[61]
Merritt also introduces a new idea—atavism is not necessarily a bad thing, especially in those of a superior racial identity. Atavistic humans recognize ancient evil more quickly than modern humans. Thora Halverson, a servant, hears the music that heralds the arrival of the Dweller of the Moon Pool. She comes out of her tent, “[s]he was the great Norse type--tall, deep-breasted, moulded on the old Viking lines. Her sixty years had slipped from her, she look like some ancient priestess of Odin . . . Suddenly she raised her arms and made a curious gesture to the moon. It was—an archaic movement; she seemed to drag it from remote antiquity—yet in it was a strange suggestion of power. Twice she repeated this gesture and the tinklings died away.”[62] Other characters join the narrator in his quest, Olaf Huldrickssson, a “Viking of old” whose wife and child were taken by the Dweller, or as he states Loki, and an Irishman, Larry O’Keefe, described as the O’Keefe, an airman who has crashed into the ocean only to be rescued by the narrator. Larry believes that the family banshee will come for him, receives visits from a leprechaun, and assumes the otherworldly spirits who are against the Dweller are the Tuatha De Danann of Irish legend.[63] Without his atavistic friends, Larry and Olaf, the narrator would not have been able to defeat the Dweller, one, a Celtic hero, and the other, a Viking Berserker.
Merritt was a friend and something of a mentor to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Lovecraft was one of two men who had enormous influence on American popular culture through his written works. The other man was a younger author whom Lovecraft mentored, Robert Ervin Howard. They made white supremacy (and the racial hierarchy), male privilege, fear of degeneracy and contagion, anchors of the American imagination, narrative after narrative, and then later in film after film. No one thought to question them, others imitated them.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft popularized one idea beyond all others--the dangers of the Other to the Anglo-Saxon genome. Unlike his mentor, Merritt, Lovecraft continued to see atavism, representative of degeneracy and devolution, as a danger. His short story, “The Lurking Fear,” reveals the mystery of the Martense family on Tempest Mountain. The narrator has made a career out exploring old legends, his “love of the grotesque and the terrible” leading him on a series of quests. He comes to the mountain, “spectral and desolate,” investigating the wholesale destruction of a village, struck by lightning, in which the bodies of dismembered residents were discovered.[64] He interviews the local residents, whom he describes as “poor mongrels.”[65] They tell him “tales of a daemon which seized lone wayfarers after dark either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered of blood trails leading toward the distant mansion. Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.”[66] He calls the residents, squatters, who he “found curiously likeable in many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending the evolutionary scale because of their unfortunate ancestry and stultifying isolation.”[67] He discovers that the Martense family had last been seen in 1810, following a series of lightning strikes near the mansion and the murder of Jan Martense. As he traces the stories of demons, a monstrous being attacks him when he spends the night at the mansion, killing his armed guards. The monstrous being was “a filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground.”[68] It had one brown eye, one blue, a genetic trait of the Martense family. He finds the rest of the family in the caverns under the mansion, a stream of “dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes.”[69] The narrator destroys the mansion, the caverns, and the environs, ending the curse. Over and over again Lovecraft wrote and rewrote the story of cursed families who had devolved into monstrous beings, either through intermarriage with something other than human, an ape or an aquatic beast, and isolated themselves. Often the narrator discovers that he is a member of the cursed family, devolving himself into a cannibalistic being or an aquatic beast.[70]
Atavism was not the only danger Lovecraft saw, he imagined a great evil in the world linked to ancient blood cults, a world in which the Anglo-Saxon and Aryan were under attack. Pure unadulterated racism frequently appears in Lovecraft’s stories, “swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features . . . push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place.”[71] In “The Horror at Red Hook”, Thomas F. Malone, a New York police detective, believed that his beat, Red Hook, “a maze of hybrid squalor . . . a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements” was home to an ancient cult of demon worshippers, “hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults . . . dark religions antedating the Aryan world,” who kidnapped and sacrificed young toddlers.[72] His great creation, Cthulhu, reflects this perceived danger. Cthulhu, one of the Great Old Ones, is the center of a worldwide cult, linked to remnants of ancient idols and mysterious structures, in which humans are sacrificed in bloody ceremonies. This cult is seen in action, at a voodoo ceremony in a shunned area of the swamp near New Orleans in “The Call of Cthulhu.”[73]
Lovecraft mentored the other great influence on American pulp fiction, Robert Ervin Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian and a host of other exemplary manly men. For Howard atavism was a good thing, that “barbarism is the natural state of mankind . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”[74] Conan was a man’s man, intelligent, fierce, strong and virile, “dark, scarred, with smoldering blue eyes . . . untamed” as the forest primeval.[75] Conan is a Cimmerian of a pure-blooded Hyborian stock, of Hyperborea, a people of the North, who along with the Aesir and Vanir of Nordheim became the modern Aryans in Howard’s imagined history.[76] Conan lives life to the fullest extent in his adventures—fighting evil-doers and loving the ladies. Women are swept off their feet into his embrace, even the strongest and most independent succumbs to his forceful attention. “Conan’s fierce eyes glowed with approval as they devoured her thick golden hair, her clear wide eyes, her milky skin, sleek with exuberant heath, the firm swell of her breasts, the contours of her splendid hips.”[77] Women were objects to Conan, simply attractive beings. Even when they resisted, Conan pressed forward “until the arms that strained against him melted and twined convulsively about his massive neck.”[78] They were venal creatures, calculating and manipulative, who needed a firm hand providing protection and guidance.[79] Conan dominates all around him, a man among men, admired and honored.
Lovecraft and Howard exchanged letters between 1933 until shortly before Howard’s suicide in 1936. They reinforced each other’s ideas about white supremacy, male privilege, contagion and racial degeneracy linked to both the immigrant and what they saw as the decline of the West.[80] Howard sees “good government” as emasculating modern man, saying “[G]eneration by generation men will grow more flabby, slothful, and effeminate”, trapped in the gilded cage of civilization.[81] Howard longed for the world of the Gael and the Goth, in which “sagas hum with self-glorification, with praise of the whale-path, and the glory of the foray . . . they were alive; they stung, burned, tingled with Life—life raw and crude and violent doubtless; but Life, just the same and worthy to be classed with best efforts of the intellectual side of man.”[82] He moans, “But, I hardly think, life in this age is worth effort of living.”[83] Lovecraft encouraged Howard to accept his current circumstances, to continue his embrace of the active life and see civilization as something of a benefit, providing a safe arena in which to engage the world.[84]
Both men agreed white people were under siege; the United States was swamped—hordes of Jews, Slavs, and Asians had overrun whole neighborhoods. Lovecraft blames the high level of violence in American society directly on African Americans, poor whites, Italians and Slavic peoples. Lovecraft asserts “[I]ncidentally, you, of course, realize that all displays of violence in the northeast which you mention are foreign phenomena. Anti-Nazi mobs consist of hysterical Jews urged on by radicals, and all radical groups are of central or southeastern European origin.”[85]
What is true, none of the bloggers writing on QAnon, 8chan, 4chan, Stormfront and other sites offer any new arguments. Mike Cernovich, for example, considers feminism, “an unjustified form of affirmative action, but a perverse destructive delusion.”[86] Echoing Howard, the Proud Boys emphasize masculine domination of the female, whose proper role is that of a nurturer, whereas man is the hunter. They imagine a return to a golden age, an idealized Nordic world, male-centric and stridently antifeminist. They demand men’s rights and traditional roles for women.[87] They are simply repeating arguments that have oozed into the mainstream from late British writers, American pulp fiction, and comic books/graphic novels. They tap into older myths, such as the blood libel, and give them new life. Is it any wonder, many Americans find the messages convincing? The message has been delivered, myth after myth, narrative after narrative, film after film. Ernst Cassirer was right.
[1] Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946, reprint 1974), 3.
[2] Ibid., 296.
[3] Ibid.
[4] William J. Bernstein, The Delusion of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021), 28–37.
[5] Ibid., 385.
[6] Magda Teter, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 23.
[7] Ibid., 28–29
[8] Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1967, reprint 1996), 25–26; Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 277–81.
[9] Teter, Blood Libel, 44.
[10] Ibid., 98.
[11] Ibid., 314.
[12] William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. Act I, Scene 3, Line 1–174.
[13] Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 28–31.
[14] Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction. Second Edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 17.
[15] Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 27.
[16] Thomas Milan Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 50–53, 91.
[17] Ibid., 171–75.
[18] Andrew Marantz, Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 4, 7.
[19] WWG1WGA. QANON: An Invitation to the Great Awakening (Dallas, TX: Relentlessly Creative Books, 2019), 6.
[20] Ibid., 4–5.
[21] Ibid., 6-9, 65, 79, 88, 102; Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies, 143–49, 155–60.
[22] WWG1WGA, QAnon, 154–55.
[23] Ibid., 36, Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies, 298–301.
[24] WWG1WGA, QAnon, 259.
[25] Ibid., 47.
[26] Ibid., 248.
[27] Ibid. Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies, 305–8.
[28] WWG1WGA, QAnon, 244. The films The Dark Crystal, Monsters, Inc., and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are seen as popularizing the idea of ritual child sacrifice.
[29] Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies, 235–36; Mike Wendling. Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 144
[30] Wendling, Alt-Right,76.
[31] Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep. The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 49–50, 79–80, 146; David Neiwert. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (New York: Verso, 2017), 42–43; Alexandra Minna Stern. Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2019), 16–17; Ugur Umil Ungor, Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 149.
[32] Cultural Marxism is an umbrella term for women’s and homosexual rights, “birth control, socialism, atheism, relativism, environmentalism, immigration, multiculturalism.” See Wendling, Alt-Right, 81.
[33] Iron Man, prod. and dir. Kevin Feige, Avi Arad, and Jon Favreau (Paramount Pictures, 2008).
[34] David Allen Harvey, “Elite Magic in the Nineteenth Century” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 556–57.
[35] H(elena) P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy Anthropogenesis. (2 vols., London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, Limited, 1888), II, 101.
[36] Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, II, 421.
[37] Ibid., 425.
[38] Ibid., 317.
[39] Cesare Lombroso, trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, Criminal Man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 39, 91.
[40] Robert Louis Stevenson. Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886; Bantam Books, 1981 ), 15.
[41] Ibid., 7.
[42] Ibid., 24, 53–54, 69–75.
[43] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (2 vols., Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1960), II 715, 750.
[44] H(enry) Rider Haggard, She (London: Dover Publications, 1887), 8.
[45] Ibid., 16.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid., 106.
[48] Ibid., 60.
[49] Ibid., 118.
[50] Ibid., 182.
[51] Ibid., 213.
[52] Ibid., 193.
[53] Bram Stoker, Dracula (1965; New York: Penguin Group/Signet Classic, 1992), 149, 183–84.
[54] Sax Rohmer, Brood of the Witch Queen (1918; New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966), 9.
[55] Ibid., 34.
[56] Ibid., 33.
[57] Ibid., 74.
[58] Ibid., 174–76.
[59] Ibid., 186–90.
[60] A(rthur) A. Merritt, The Moon Pool (1919; New York: Avon Books, 1951), 4, 11.
[61] Ibid., 6–9, 31, 34.
[62] Ibid., 16.
[63] Ibid., 39–49.
[64] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear,” in The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Chartwell Books, 2016), 238, 240.
[65] Ibid., 239.
[66] Ibid.
[67] Ibid., 244.
[68] Ibid., 256.
[69] Ibid., 255.
[70] Lovecraft, “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” ibid., 122–30; “The Rats in the Walls”, ibid., 257–73.
[71] Lovecraft, “The Street,” ibid., 72.
[72] Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook,” ibid., 335–54.
[73] Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu (Found among the Papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston),” ibid., 381–407.
[74] Robert E. Howard. “Beyond the Black River,” in Red Nails, by Robert E. Howard, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (1935; New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1977), 92.
[75] Howard, “Black River, ibid., 18.
[76] Howard, “The Hyborian Age,” ibid., 249–79.
[77] Howard, “The Devil in Iron” in The People of the Black Circle, by Robert E. Howard, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1977), 55.
[78] Ibid.
[79] Howard, “Shadows in Zamboula” in Red Nails, by Howard, ed. Wagner, 113; Howard, “The People of the Black Circle” in People of the Black Circle, by Howard, ed. Wagner, 106.
[80] S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke, eds., A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, 1933–1936 (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011), 519–22.
[81] Letter dated March 6, 1933, in Means to Freedom, ed. Joshi, Schultz, and Burke, 543.
[82] Ibid., 547–48.
[83] Ibid., 544.
[84] Letter dated Nov. 2, 1933, ibid., 674.
[85] Letter dated April 7, 1934, ibid., 754.
[86] Marantz, Anti-Social, 144.
[87] Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, 21, 33–38, Wendling, Alt-Right, 62–71.