Public Execution

I don’t know how many people I’ve seen die on the internet. There was the Russian soldier, calm as he would be if he were waiting for a bus, raked by machine-gun fire and dropping to the forest floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Dozens of Gazan civilians. The Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh obliterated by an AH64 Apache’s M230 chain gun, caught on the grainy black-and-white feed of a gun camera. Charlie Kirk in that white t-shirt, the bullet that killed him putting a period on a sentence that ended with the word ‘violence.’ 

I haven’t sought out any of these clips. I don’t think that I am doing the victims of violence any kind of service by witnessing their last moments. I haven’t become more radical through seeing how cruel the world can be. I haven’t even become numb. Each one hurts like the last, and they don’t stop.

I don’t have much to thank Donald J. Trump for, but one thing that he has personally seen to is that I won’t have to watch the death of Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009. He overruled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who blurted out the idea on a podcast. It was unlikely to have been a well-thought-through policy, if thinking went into it at all. Trump supporters seemed divided over the plan when asked.

The plan only saw enthusiastic support from the most ghoulish members of the right wing. Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey issued a lengthy defense of public executions on psuedo-libertarian grounds (we must see the violence of the state to understand it apparently), Laura Loomer was of course ecstatic, and Pete Hegseth’s pastor, the deeply sinister Doug Wilson, defended it on biblical grounds. 

That last is perhaps the best lens through which to view it: acts of violence are a sacrament in the fascist civic religion. Understanding the place of an act like a livestreamed execution within the fascist movement and the fascist mindset is key to understanding both.

In the period immediately following the Second World War, international fascism found itself in something of a tricky situation. Fascists had always faced a fundamental problem: they were a ‘party of cranks’ with embarrassing propaganda, and more importantly there were not enough people who saw the world as they did, who had what would be later termed the ‘authoritarian personality.’ The early fascist solution to this had been to either take countries through a coup d’état, as Mussolini had done, or manoeuvre through the electoral system until they could slip into power, like Hitler. From there, they could rebuild the masses that they despised into the ‘fascist new man’ while eliminating any that were surplus to requirements. 

But things fell apart. Mussolini died hanging from a gas station. Hitler shot himself to escape the Red Army. For the fascist facing the ruins of their project, a new explanation, and a new form of struggle, had to be developed. Fascist groups across the world arrived at the same ideas more or less independently of each other, but some thinkers were more influential than others, and Julius Evola is particularly prominent, even today. 

Aside from being, by his own admission, a ‘super fascist,’ Evola was a mystic who took inspiration from a range of initiatory systems, both Eastern and Western, and his solution to the post-war malaise borrowed heavily from these traditions. We can see this syncretism play out over four decades and three books. In 1931’s Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola lays out his top-level conception of the world and the current situation. There was once a world of Tradition, governed by masculine, pre-rational values: caste, initiation, the subordination of women. This was replaced by our current age, the ‘Kali Yuga,’ in which power has fallen down the caste system from kings and warriors to merchants and the masses. 

The makeup of Evola’s desired revolt against modernity is laid out by his next book, 1951’s Men Among the Ruins. He advocates for the creation of a new elite modelled after the ‘Männerbund,’ bands of male warriors who stood outside of ancient societies. These groupuscles would wage an ‘Occult War’ until they could found a pan-European empire, an idea that would influence the French New Right of the 1970s. Evola’s ideal elite, though, would be entirely male, maintaining a safe space away from femininity, ruthlessly policing the masculinity of its members.

1961’s Ride the Tiger is the book that best explains the current phase of the fascist movement. It is Evola’s bleakest, most spiteful work, arguing that for the “differentiated man,” whose heart belongs in the world of Tradition, there is nothing worth defending in the current age. Evola advocates for “apoliteia,” a complete detachment from political life—though this does not mean abstaining from political action. In fact, his most devoted readers were the architects of the Italian ‘Years of Lead.’ For groups like Ordine Nuovo and Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, terrorist violence served no purpose beyond existential self-assertion. NAR’s founder Valerio Fioravanti put it best: “About defeat we never cared. We are a generation of losers.”

In his book Cultura di destra, the mythologist Franco Jesi puts forward the notion that many of the bombings and shootings that convulsed Italy during the 1970s were intentionally “useless acts.” That is, they had no real political content, no strategic aims, but served to initiate the lower orders of the fascist movement into a higher, spiritual caste. The brutality of their acts created what Jesi termed religio mortis: a religion of death. Whether an individual fascist killed or was killed was largely immaterial for Evola’s successors. The purpose was to create men who could do what must be done, up to and including dying for a cause, even if there was no hope of victory in their lifetimes. It wasn’t political. It was aesthetic, even spiritual.

In the classic science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin asks us to imagine a man who may change reality by dreaming it. The neo-fascists inspired by Evola dream of putting that program into reverse: to change the dreams of mankind through acts of nihilistic violence. The aesthetic and the practical are fused in this mythic worldview. 

Across the Atlantic, American neo-Nazis were coming to the same conclusion. William Luther Pierce, a member of the National Socialist White People’s Party, became disillusioned by the party’s infighting and its failed attempts to recreate a pre-war mass party. His response was to create the National Alliance, a groupuscule with a platform that was purposefully vague, aside from Nazi-inflected misanthropy. His major contribution to the cause was penning The Turner Diaries and Hunter, two books that would do more than just establish a modus operandi for fascist groups and ‘lone wolves.’ These were not books about why one would want to become a National Socialist, but about what it feels like, what libidinal satisfactions can be gained from spreading terror and misery. The protagonist of The Turner Diaries dies at the end of the book in a suicide bombing, and the “National League” in Hunter fails, but that's fine—like Evola, Pierce believed that exemplary death and defeat is just as useful for building the myth-aesthetic as success is.

By the 1980s and 1990s, such ideas made their way into the neo-folk and industrial music subcultures, into the hands of bohemians interested in anything extreme and transgressive. It wasn’t an obscure neo-Nazi printing operation but Adam Parfrey’s relatively mainstream Feral House Press that first published Siege, a book by William Luther Pierce’s acolyte James Mason, which went further than anyone when arguing that the right had no path forward through politics, so all that remained was vindictive, pointless acts of lone-wolf violence. To Mason, Charles Manson was as important as Hitler. Unlike the articulate Evola, Mason was a gutter-level pamphleteer (and a paedophile, of course) who could bring the religio mortis to the masses. Spiritual development was sidelined entirely. 

By the 2010s, the vanguard of the fascist movement had moved from terrorist groupuscules into mutually radicalising online communities—digital Männerbunden. The writings of Evola, Pierce, Mason, and more obscure figures were shared freely, cross-pollinating from ‘true’ neo-Nazi communities like Stormfront and Iron March into the nascent ‘alt-right’ on 4chan. Indoctrination was only a small part of the culture in these spaces. The religion of death was proselytised by teenage boys pushing boundaries and calling each other gay if anyone said that they’d gone too far.

By the current day, these communities have progressed so far from anything even remotely political that the FBI now refers to members of the now-defunct groups 764 and Maniac Murder Cult as “nihilistic violent extremists” rather than neo-Nazis. Although many still encourage each other to engage in traditional political violence—generally through mass shootings justified on tenuous ‘accelerationist’ grounds—it is just as common to show how ‘based’ one is by grooming young children into cutting themselves on camera or killing their pets, trading child pornography and gore pictures. 

It is a mistake to think that there is an impenetrable firewall separating the radical and mainstream wings of the right. A pipeline exists to channel extreme ideas to the masses. Young Republican aides are smuggling ideas from the fringes into everyday discourse. We have seen this happen with the Great Replacement theory over the past few years. ICE officers regularly wear the ‘siege masks’ popularised by Atomwaffen. The ‘groomer’ slur was propagated by far-right spaces on 4chan.

This pipeline can exist because a man as powerful as Hegseth lives in the same Kali Yuga as anyone else. For all his power, he can’t make Iran bend to his will. He’s a punchline on SNL who as soon as Trump is no longer in office will be either arrested for war crimes or posting on the bottom tier of the Cameo app. He is a loser, following an ideology by and for losers. That means that he is very concerned that other losers prove their devotion to the religion of death by showing indifference to human suffering. 

The execution of Nidal Hasan, should it occur, will be a useless act. Making a public exhibition of such an execution would be a capital-u, capital-a Useless Act. We make a mistake if we believe that the plan to do so was intended to achieve any real-world effect. It wasn’t. That it would create more ugliness and misery in the world would be an intended externality. When Hegseth proposed the idea, he was intending to create something that would allow a small number of mostly younger men to, through consuming it, affirm that they are able to enjoy the production of death. Meaning that they are cruel, meaning that they are masculine, meaning that they are Elect. It is the endpoint of a fascist mindset that was never noble, but which once had intellectual pretensions, now shed in favour of just being stupid and cruel. The new fascist man must be posted into being.

Featured image is "Austrians executing Serbs 1917," Underwood & Underwood 1917.