[Ed. Note: Chip Berlet is senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive non-profit think tank in Somerville, MA and on the advisory board of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He is co-author, with Matthew N. Lyons, of Right Wing Populism in America, Guilford Press, forthcoming, on which this article is in part based.]

Genocidal movements -- i.e., groups with genocidal goals and ideologies -- and hate mongers can operate in any society, including states committed to pluralist forms of democracy. In the United States this dynamic is made even more complex by the First Amendment to the US Constitution which guarantees the right to free speech--even for those calling for genocide or expulsion of scapegoated groups. This type of speech generally becomes criminal in the US only when it veers into specific individual threats or acts of violence or intimidation. Given these circumstances, those concerned about genocidal movements and actors in the US often concentrate on hate groups, hate crimes, and curricula for mass education. (Such curricula will not be discussed in this article but information is available from sponsoring organizations listed at the end.)

The far right in the United States is composed of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, the Christian Patriots, racist and neonazi skinheads, ideological fascists, and neo-Nazis. The term "far right" in this context refers to groups with an aggressively insurgent or extra-legal agenda, including calls for denying basic human rights to a target group. While terms like "fascist" and "Nazi" have been widely misused, they are the proper terms to describe certain sectors of the revolutionary right movement in the United States. Christian Patriots combine Christian nationalism with constitutionalism. Non-Christian neo- Nazis are able to work in coalitions with the slightly less zealous Christian Patriot groups due to shared antigovernment sentiments, racism, and conspiracism rooted in historic anti- Jewish bigotry. In turn, these groups interact with right wing populist movements with a more reformist agenda.

The most significant worldview in the Christian Patriot movement and the far right is Christian Identity, which believes the United States is the biblical "Promised Land" and considers white Christians to be God's "Chosen People." Within the Christian Identity movement, the Biblical apocalypse is a race war. Some in the far right believe that the US government is ZOG--a Zionist- occupied government-- and thus lacks legitimacy. Michael Barkun in Religion and the Racist Right (1994) has tracked the influence of apocalyptic millennialism on major racist and antisemitic ideologues within early Christian Identity, including Wesley Swift, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, Sheldon Emry, and Pete Peters. Identity is an outgrowth of the earlier British Israelism. Christian Identity is the theology of the Aryan Nations and related groups, and it seems to have motivated Buford O'Neal Furrow, Jr., accused in the 1999 shootings at a Jewish community center and the later murder of a Philipino-American postal worker. Furrow called his actions a "wake up call" for America.

Benjamin Nathaniel Smith also went on a shooting rampage in 1999 in Illinois and Indiana, targeting Jews, Blacks and Asians. He then killed himself. Smith was influenced by the Church of the Creator, founded on the principles in The White Man's Bible and other lengthy books by the late founder, Ben Klassen. Creativity is a crude neonazi theology cobbled together with odd bits of paganism, Odinism, the theories of Nietzsche, and Aryanist White supremacy. A sample of the theology: "The niggers is (sic) the vital means of bastardizing the White Race...The Jews are therefore madly pushing a program of upgrading the niggers and pulling down the White." The suggested solution is to ship Blacks back to Africa, "drive the Jews from power and render them harmless," and "hang the traitors of our own race" (White Man's Bible, p. 184).

Hate Crimes Statistics.

According to a study issued by the American Sociological Association (see http://www.publiceye.org/hate99ASA_toc.htm): "While some consider the 1990s to be the decade of hate, or at least of hate crime, hate crime is perhaps better characterized as an age- old problem with a new sense of urgency. During the 1980s and 1990s, multiple social movements devoted considerable material and symbolic resources to the problem. Government task forces analyzed the issue. Legislative campaigns have sprung up at every level of government. New sentencing rules and categories of criminal behavior have been established in law. Prosecutors and law enforcement have developed training policies and specialized enforcement units. The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in with its rejection of one statutory formula and acceptance of another. Scholarly commentary and social science research on the topic has exploded."

Over the past four years, now that national data collection has been . stabilized to a degree, the figures show a remarkable consistency. Last year (1999) saw a spate of horrific attacks with multiple victims, perhaps motivated by apocalyptic visions and millennial expectation sparked by the approach of the year 2,000. But there currently is no data to suggest an overall increase in incidents which have totalled between 7,800 and 8,800 in the US between 1995 and 1998 (1999 figures are not yet available)--or a major shift in targets. About seven out of ten incidents are attacks on persons (the rest are against property): the greatest number of these are acts of intimidation and assaults. (Statistics, analyzed by Political Research Associates, are based on hate crimes figures collected by the FBI under the Uniform Crime Reports Program.) The greatest number (and percent) of attacks in 1998 were (in rank order) anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-male homosexual and anti-white. When population sizes of different groups are taken into account, the most vulnerable targets are (in rank order) Jews, blacks and male homosexuals (the order of the latter two is uncertain because of uncertainty of the size of the male homosexual population). The most significant small trends in 1997-98 appear to be a decrease in anti-white attacks, and an increase in attacks on gay men and lesbians. Public consciousness of hate crimes is growing because of the widely publicized cruel murders in Wyoming and Texas and shooting rampages in Illinois, Indiana and California.

Advocates of hate crime laws declare that society must show its disapproval of acts which not only injure individuals but are directed toward a whole group. Critics of hate crimes laws emerged during the debate over their passage and . they continue to criticize such legislation and attempts to broaden it. Some libertarians argue that the state has no business criminalizing thought. Some conservatives argue against laws that they see as giving "special rights" to a particular group. Some on the left argue that adding more time to criminal sentences in a society already obsessed with arrests, mandatory sentences, and incarceration is counterproductive.

Analytical Issues.

Do we really understand the dynamics linking genocide, hate groups, hate crimes, discrimination, prejudice, ethnocentrism, oppression, demonization, scapegoating, conspiracism, apocalypticism? An increasing number of US scholars argue the relationships among these processes remain obscure and insufficiently studied. Meanwhile, public policy agencies, private human relations groups, and the media frequently ignore or reject the important contemporary research that is available. "Extremism" as a label explains little. Members of organized hate groups commit just a tiny percentage of hate crimes, yet language blaming "extremists" and a "lunatic fringe" persists. Are we looking at acts of individual disaffection or deviance (based on paranoid thinking) or a shared collective belief in an apocalyptic paradigm? Can violent attacks against blacks be attributed to individual pathology or are they an expression of widespread racism?

How social scientists look at these questions has changed over time. Centrist/extremist theory was the first major attempt to explain right wing populism. It arrived with the 1955 publication of a collection of essays titled The New American Right edited by Daniel Bell. Eight years later the collection was expanded and republished under the title, The Radical Right. A number of books appeared that either elaborated on or paralleled the general themes of centrist/extremist theory first sketched in The New American Right. Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Life (1965) traced the appearance of conspiracy theories throughout American history.

Centrist/extremist theory saw dissident movements of the left and. right as composed of outsiders--politically marginal people who have no connection to the mainstream electoral system or nodes of government or corporate power. Social and economic stress snaps these psychologically-fragile people into a mode of irrational political hysteria, and as they embrace an increasingly paranoid style they make militant and unreasonable demands to defend their social and economic status. Because they are unstable, they can become dangerous and violent. Their extremism places them far outside the legitimate political process, which is located in the center where pluralists conduct civil democratic debates.

Centrist/extremist theory marginalizes populist dissidents as dangerous irrational extremists. Their grievances and demands need not be taken seriously. Law enforcement can break up any criminal conspiracies by subversive radicals who threaten the social order. The centrist/extremist model favors labels such as "radical right," "right wing nuts," "lunatic fringe," or "religious political extremists."

Christian Smith notes in Disruptive Religion that in the 1970s there was "a decisive pendulum-swing away from these 'classical' theories toward the view of social movements as rational, strategically calculating, politically instrumental phenomena" (1997, p. 3). At the same time, there was a rejection of the romanticized view of populism as inherently constructive. Dobratz and Shanks-Meile in "White Power, White Pride!" write that in studying populist social movements it is necessary to consider "socioeconomic conditions, changing political opportunities, resources, consciousness, labeling, framing, interpretations of reality, boundaries, and negotiation of the meaning of symbols" (1997, p. 32).

Social scientists following Hofstadter usually divided the. phenomena he described into discrete yet related components: apocalypticism, demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism. They also moved away from the idea that conspiracism was tied to a pathological psychological condition. Some combination of the sociological and psychological is now considered a fruitful area of research.

From Populist Scapegoating to Hate.

Where do genocidalist groups do their recruiting in a democratic society? Mary Rupert in "The Patriot Movement and the Roots of Fascism" (in Susan Allen Nan, Windows to Conflict Analysis and Resolution, 1997) argues that the reformist patriot and armed militia movements act as a seedbed for growing fascism, and a potential recruiting pool for the far right. This dynamic is important.

The armed militia movement that emerged in 1994 was the militant wing . of the larger Patriot movement -- a diverse right-wing populist revolt composed of independent groups in many states. At its height in the mid-1990s perhaps as many as five million U.S. citizens accepted to varying degrees the Patriot contention that our government was manipulated by conspiratorial elites-- Zionists, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street and eastern bankers. They anticipated that the government was planning to impose some form of repression. The antigovernment aspect of the Patriot movement focused on federal gun control, taxes, regulations, and a range of actions identified as federal attacks on individual citizen's constitutional liberties. In anticipation of an attack by government forces, a significant segment of the Patriot and armed militia movement embraced survivalism.

Both the Patriot and armed militia movements grew rapidly, relying on computer networks, FAX trees, short-wave radio, AM talk radio, and videotape and audiotape distribution. These movements are arguably the first major US social movements to be organized primarily through overlapping nontraditional electronic media. The core narrative carried by these media outlets was apocalyptic, featuring claims that the U.S. government was controlled by a vast conspiracy of secret elites plotting a New World Order, to be imposed by a globalist UN police state using troops carried by black helicopters. During the mid-1990s, armed militias were sporadically active in all fifty states, with numbers estimated at between 20,000 and 60,000. After the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, these numbers began to shrink, with only the most hardcore members remaining active.

Timothy McVeigh, who planted the bomb in Oklahoma City, passed through the Patriot-linked gun show circuit and militia movement, but had moved from broad conspiracist antigovernment beliefs into a more militant neo-Nazi ideology. To avoid prosecution, some far right leaders had called for "leaderless resistance," urging followers to form cells and take action without direct coordination.

McVeigh's apparently secular concern that during the Gulf War the government had implanted a micro-chip into his body echoes historic concerns among Fundamentalist Christians that the Mark of the Beast might be hidden in electronic devices. To explain his views, McVeigh handed out copies of The Turner Diaries to his friends. The book was available at gun shows and survivalist emergency preparedness seminars before the bombing, but few militia members had ever read it or even heard of it until the Oklahoma City bombing.

Written by neo-Nazi William Pierce, The Turner Diaries has apocalyptic and anti-Semitic themes invoking the cleansing nature of ritual violence typical of Nazi ideology which sought a millenarian Thousand Year Reich. The Turner Diaries extols fascist violence in support of white supremacy and even describes as heroic the terror bombing of a federal building. The book envisions a race war in the US, leading to the victory of white supremacists who lynch, deport, and annihilate blacks, other non- whites, mixed couples and Jews. The new regime would spread. "The blood flowed ankle-deep in the streets of many of Europe's great cities" (Turner Diaries, 1978, p. 209).

When looking at the justifications given by members of organized hate groups for their attitudes and actions, a pattern is visible--a form of right-wing populism called producerism. Producerism links a conspiracy theory of history with xenophobia and racism in a distinct narrative that sees a noble middle class of hard-working producers being squeezed by secret elites above and lazy, sinful parasites below.

Fascism is the most virulent form of right-wing populism, says Peter Fritzsche in Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (1999). It is no surprise that US neo-Nazis would repackage it in a producerist version for Christian Identity. Jews, in this world view, are the ultimate puppet-masters among the liberal secret elites who are seen as building a global new world order. People of color are the lazy parasites gnawing away at society at below, while gay men and lesbians, feminists, and abortion providers are the sinful parasites, poisoning the moral order. The approach of the year 2000 serves to heat up millennial expectation and apocalyptic anger in this world view.

The producerist narrative can be found not just in the far right but in the Christian right, in sectors that blame a conspiracy of liberal secular humanists for societal problems, and in the Patriot and Militia movements, where there is a widespread belief in a conspiracy to impose a one-world government through the United Nations. Conspiracism, in this regard, is a narrative form of scapegoating in which the demonized "other" is blamed for plotting against the common good while the person raising the alarm is cast in the role of hero.

The appeal of producerism, however, stems from mainstream political problems. Although we are living in the US in a period of prosperity and low unemployment, many middle-class white men sense that their economic and social status is eroding, and they blame the government. For some there has been a loss of economic status as wealth becomes increasingly unequal in our society. There has been a backlash against affirmative action and womens' equality. Many white men long for their lost privilege and power in the face of the social liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. (See also Susan Faludi, Stiffed, 1999). Whether grievances are real or imaginary, legitimate or illegitimate, the perception is what counts, because it creates a sense of collective identity and motivates them to mobilize.

Conclusions.

Popular discussion of hate and genocide in the US is based to a large degree on myths promoted by superficial and hyperbolic media coverage. Most hate crimes in the US are not committed by members of organized hate groups. Most members of organized hate groups are zealous ideologues, but they are no more prone to mental illness than the rest of us. We need to see the patterns and dynamics of demonization, scapegoating, conspiracism, and apocalyptic millennialism. We need to see the rise of white nationalism as part of a troubling worldwide trend toward exclusive nationalism and religious fundamentalism (whose ideologies serve exclusive and authoritarian goals). We need to see how far some assumptions of genocidal ideology have crept into our everyday political life, waiting for the right moment to germinate. Could the followers of "leaderless resistance" turn into the troops for a fascist leader working within the system?

Selected Resources