“White genocide”: post-war fascism and the ideological value of evoking existential conflicts

As scholars such as Aristotle Kallis have ably demonstrated, before 1945 fascist movements often followed the lead set by Nazism and regularly ‘licenced’ genocidal activities.1 A cluster of fascist and proto-fascist movements, such as the Croatian Ustaša, were actively genocidal during the Second World War, in broadly the same way as the Nazis themselves. Since 1945, genocidal aspirations among a wide variety of fascists operate on the level of fantasy, not reality. Indeed, aside from the Holocaust denial movement explored elsewhere in this volume, one common response from a wide variety of postwar fascists has been to celebrate past fascist genocides. Examples here are quite numerous, and include the creation of a board game based on Monopoly where the winner is the person who sends the most Jews to gas chambers; this was produced by the German National Socialist Underground.2 Meanwhile the British neo-Nazi group Combat 18 developed a notably ambivalent attitude towards the Holocaust, claiming at one point: ‘Our view on the Holocaust is if it didn’t happen it should have; if it did happen it’s a pity they didn’t kill them all.’3 Another response to genocide has been to find new ways to evoke the existential conflict raised by the idea of the destruction of one defined community for the preservation of another, resulting in various articulations of the theme that white people are now themselves subject to an ongoing process of cultural genocide, or ethnocide (both terms are regularly employed in the discourse).