'THERE IS NO POLITICAL SOLUTION': ACCELERATIONISM IN THE WHITE POWER MOVEMENT

by Cassie Miller
Southern Poverty Law Center, June 23, 2020

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What defines white supremacist accelerationists is their belief that violence is the only way to pursue their political goals. To put it most simply, accelerationists embrace terrorism. Accelerationists aren’t part of a new movement. They’re just an iteration more inclined toward terroristic violence than has existed in recent decades.

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Violence has always been at the core of the white power movement. It’s justified by a belief that a genocide is being committed against white people, which paints violence on the part of extremists as defensive. It’s also irrational to suggest that any of the movement’s goals – racial separation or the creation of an ethnostate – could ever possibly occur without violence. But, for the sake of optics, most of the movement’s adherents refused to openly state the obvious.

We’re seeing the growth of the accelerationist wing, which openly embraces terroristic violence as a political tool, because the question of optics now holds far less weight. An ever-growing segment of the white power movement no longer sees any use in pursuing electoral politics, which stems in large part from their disappointment in the Trump administration and their belief that, if anything, the president simply bought them more time before society begins to crumble. They also feel demographic change bearing down on them, making the notion of building a consciously pro-white political coalition all the more improbable.

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LEADERLESS RESISTANCE: AN OLD WHITE POWER TACTIC GETS REVIVED

Insurgent violence has always played a role in the modern white power movement, though its appeal has ebbed and flowed. According to historian Kathleen Belew, the movement first underwent a “revolutionary turn” in 1983, when white power leaders met at the Aryan Nations World Congress and reportedly declared war on the federal government. It was a moment of political upheaval similar in many ways to the present, with a public increasingly uncertain about their economic future, suspicious of government and public institutions, and politically polarized. Combined with the aggrievement and betrayal many veterans felt after Vietnam, those factors provided fertile ground for a white power movement that was decidedly in favor of violent overthrow of the American government.

Many of the leaders to emerge from that moment remain important figures in the white power movement, especially Klansman Louis Beam, who was the most notable figure to articulate the “leaderless resistance” strategy that guided radical elements of the movement well into the 1990s. In a 1983 essay, Beam argued that extremists should organize themselves into “phantom cells” – made up of just one or a handful of members – that would carry out violent actions against the state. While not formally joined together, all the members of the white power community would read the same foundational literature so that they retained ideological cohesion. It would be, he wrote, “an intelligence nightmare for a government” to try to track the disconnected cells, all operating under their own direction and not the guidance of an organizational leader.

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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/23/there-no-political-solution-accelerationism-white-power-movement